Genres, a tentative definition

Genres are flexible and versatile cultural categories structuring human understanding and communication. On the one hand, they are strongly regulative, but on the other hand, they allow considerable freedom on the part of both the utterer and the recipient. Genres combine to form larger patterns through social and organizational structuring into genre sets, systems, hierarchies, and chains, and through creative uptakes on the part of individual genre users. 

Genre labels and fake news

In a previous post I wrote about the genre "real news" as opposed to "news" on the assumption that the genre label "real news" wasn't well-established, but that the rhetorical move performed while invoking it was very strong indeed.

In the present post, I address a genre label that has risen to prominence in recent years: fake news. 

A crucial, sometimes efficient, sometimes highly problematic, feature of genre is that genres tend to naturalize themselves. They become habitual, invisible even. We can do a lot of thinking and a lot of acting with genre with knowing it. "Fake news" is such a chameleon.

Today, the genre label "fake news" is everywhere in debate. It's well-nigh impossible to log on to social media without encountering it, and the phenomenon it covers seems to be responsible for major societal challenges. However, this is a very recent development, and if you go back just a few years not only did few people know what "fake news" meant, those that did, knew that it meant something else. It meant news satire. Thus, this book which is on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Notice the subtitle.

This one about The Onion and Philosophy is also quite confident in its usage of the "fake news" label to mean "news satire". Again, notice the subtitle.¨

I know all of this, because I research news satire and used to say that I worked with "fake news". Way back then, in 2015 and early 2016, I drew well-nigh no public attention at all with the term and had to explain it wherever I went.

However, at some point during 2016 all of this changed. "Fake news" was suddenly on everybody's lips. It wasn´t even early in the year, more like mid-late 2016, when the US presidential election heated up. But the genre label had a new meaning (or rather two new meanings, I'll get back to that); and the older meaning was well-nigh forgotten. If you say "fake news" today you definitely don´t make people expect to hear about news satire. This demonstrates two interesting features about genre labels.

• They can can change their meaning; they can even rise to prominence without retaining their original meaning. 
• When a cultural phenomenon rises to prominence it is going to need a genre label.

Along the way, the meaning of the word "fake" in the genre label itself changed. An old beloved dictionary of mine defines the word "fake" in this way:

To do up, to cover up defects and faults so at to give a presentable appearance to, to doctor; to contrive, to fabricate, to make up from defective material; to cheat, to fraud, to deceive. n. A thing thus prepared for deception, esp. a manufactured antique <...> a swindle, a dodge.

In this sense, in its original meaning, "news satire", the meaning of the word was ironic. The news satire services themselves pointed to the fradulent character of their news reporting. Thus UNnews, a service of the Wikipedia parody Uncylopedia describes itself like this:

UnNews is a service of Uncyclopedia that spreads misinformation and cons the public into swallowing it hook-line-and-sinker (and worm), by guilefully making it resemble authentic news articles. UnNews stories use satire to ensure the most unfair and biased reporting possible.

So, the cheating is clearly labelled, and there is no actual disinformation taking place, though there is a lot of pretend disinformation. (Isn´t it lovely btw?)

In the new usage, however, the "fake" in the term clearly refers to a fraudulent intention in the supposed news reporting. It is a purposeful swindle, a dodge. Like a manufactured antique, it is there to make you buy something that you would do better to avoid. The sudden rise to prominence of a genre label clearly points to the fact that something had become exigent in the public sphere: the information value and trustworthiness of what appeared to be news reporting. Disinformation in presumed news reporting had become critical.

As recent developments in the Cambridge Analytica- scandal have again demonstrated, it is no coincidence that this happend alongside the Brexit-vote and the US presidential election. Fake news has been a key term to understand both. And it has been pertinent ever since. However, no sooner had the term risen to prominence, before it acquired two different meanings. Related, but quite obviously opposed.

One was the disinformation posing as news spread by the likes of Breitbart, InfoWars and similar - sometimes even more obscure - "news" services, but also frequently presented by supposed serious media institutions. Here, false stories were fabricated to achieve a social impact - in particular through repostings on social media. It's worth noticing that these stories are closer to bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense than to lying. It does not matter if the untruths get exposed; in fact claiming that the pope or this or that actor supports Trump's election is bound to be found out. However, the revelation lags behind the fabricated story which spreads like wildfire across SoMe and reaches far more people than the, less dramatic, correction. So, the swindle-stories are written for effect; not to hide the truth per se, but to spread a certain kind of disinformation. In this case, therefore, the "fake news" genre label is used to warn against a certain kind of disinformation. And as such it has been fairly effective.

However, at the same time, or following it closely. another meaning arose. It was used by the very disinformers themselves to attack not fabricated news stories, but the channels that reported the actual news. If, for example, a news story is inconvenient to the sitting US president, it is labelled "fake news"; no matter how well documented it is. Rhetorically speaking, it's a lame-ass bully defense and can be torn apart easily in rational discourse, but again it is strangely effective. Again, it doesn´t matter if the lie is disingenuous and exposed as long as the disinformation works; as long as you can get the MAGA-crowd to shout "fake news", you can de-legitimize the actual news reporting and legitimize your own actions without having to answer for them.

So, the genre label "fake news" has moved from a fairly harmless, if somewhat confusing label for news satire to a critical cultural battleground in the fight to retain Western democracy as we know it. If you can define what news stories belong to the genre, if you can label them, you can win the rhetorical battle over what information gets to count in the public sphere and thus further the public acceptance of your political agenda. Be it democratic or despotic.

For further reading, this rather good academic article disambiguates the different usages nicely.

The blog post was originally written as a Twitter thread to celebrate my 5000th follower. The thread can be seen here.

Update April 16th: I forgot to mention that most of what I know about genre labels I have learnt from my former PhD student Jacob Ølgaard Nyboe. Some of Jacob's fine work with genre labels and genre signatures can be found in his brilliant article "The Game of the Name" here.