The battles for Aleppo (2012–2016) and Mosul (2016–2017) were two intense and brutal sieges, which resulted in 31,000 and 40,000 largely civilian casualties, respectively, as well as hundreds of thousands of refugees. Even though both campaigns were similar in many ways, they received an entirely different media echo. While Aleppo in its final phase was covered almost daily, detailing the suffering of civilians and the brutality of the Syrian government and its Russian allies, while ignoring actions of rebels, Mosul received much sparser treatment, mostly relating to atrocities committed by the Islamic State (backgrounding casualties inflicted by coalition forces). In both cases, the respective governments claimed to be fighting terrorists, but only in the case of Mosul was this narrative naturalized by the media. Drawing on various methods from critical media studies, this article analyses how and why the two battles were reported on differently by British mainstream media across the ideological spectrum. The purpose is to show how systemic bias based on a binary us vs them distinction leads to distortion and a reinforcement of dominant, populistic and partisan narratives that may threaten to background or ignore uncomfortable but important facts that would challenge people in power.

Background: Experts are a favorite source of information in the news media as they have the ability to provide balanced and authoritative comments on important issues. However, two factors cast doubt on the extent to which such experts can actually provide balanced information: conflicts of interest and areas of expertise. In this paper, we analyze the use of expert voices during the COVID pandemic in two Austrian broadsheet papers. Methods: We examine the use of reporting verbs employed to indicate the journalists’ stance towards the expert comments as well as the relationship of those comments to the experts’ fields of expertise and to any potential conflicts of interest. Results: Our analysis shows that the media uncritically reported experts that had considerable conflicts of interest, while others were permitted to comment on topics far outside their particular fields. Conclusions: In the absence of journalistic scrutiny, distance, and context, both of these practices are likely to have led audiences to take the experts’ comments at face value and therefore to have embraced unbalanced information that amplified official narratives, to the exclusion of alternative voices.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, in many parts of the Global North, the public has looked to the media as an important source of information about new developments and measures to combat the spread of the virus. The main measure propagated by governments in this respect was the mass vaccination program. In this context, two important concepts in the media coverage were herd immunity and vaccine efficacy, both of which had to be reevaluated over time. In this study, we looked at the discursive construction of “the science” in the discourse on herd immunity and vaccine efficacy in two Austrian broadsheet newspapers. Our corpus-based analysis showed a tendency to overuse linguistic items implying certainty in the face of a very fast-changing, and thus uncertain, situation. We also found evidence that these two Austrian media outlets no longer function as corrective of power, but have taken on the role of mediators of sanctioned government narratives. We argue that the uncritical reporting of government narratives in such a fluid situation has led to unresolved and unreflected inconsistencies in the reporting, arguably decreasing the public’s trust in the accuracy of the COVID-19 information presented in the media.

Cross-linguistic mondegreens occur when foreign song lyrics are misperceived and reinterpreted in the listener's native language. In Japan, such humorous reinterpretations of non-native song lyrics are known assoramimi(空耳, “mishearing”). Word plays of this kind do not only have an entertaining character for listeners, but they also offer a valuable source to identify and describe potential phonological processes which can be observed in native Japanese listeners' adaptations of English song lyrics into Japanese. We hypothesized that the reinterpretation of English song lyrics by listeners is a result of the perception of non-native auditory input through the first language's phonological and morphological system. That is, misperceptions do not occur arbitrarily, but are governed by the phonological and morpho-phonological rules of the listener's first language system. To test this hypothesis, we examined a corpus containing 60 English-Japanese mondegreens taken from the Japanese TV-showSoramimi Awā(Soramimi Hour). Results confirmed our hypothesis: The Japanese adaptations were observed to follow different phonological processes which aimed to subject the non-native auditory input to the phonological rules of Japanese.

Fake news in mainstream war reporting launders atrocity narratives from anonymous officials and ideologically invested sources into accepted public facts, thereby contributing to the initiation and prolongation of armed conflict in democratic societies. Drawing on propaganda theory and the Propaganda Model, this study conceptualizes such reporting as a modern vehicle for war propaganda principles that demonize enemies through atrocity claims and norm violations. It employs a qualitative discourse analysis of 37 mainstream articles covering three high-profile debunked cases—Russian bounties for Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, Gaddafi’s alleged Viagra-fueled mass rapes in Libya, and Hamas beheading babies in Israel/Palestine—to examine sourcing practices, emotional language, hedging, presuppositions, and amplification patterns. Findings reveal heavy reliance on unscrutinized anonymous officials, visceral atrocity framing with under-hedged verbs converting allegations into facts, and bandwagon journalism that boosts initial claims while muting later debunkings. These patterns systematically manufacture consent for conflict escalation by exploiting crisis journalism pressures, advancing our understanding of how mainstream media structurally enable propaganda in democratic societies.