Une conférence-débat de Jan Teurlings (U. Amsterdam) et P.-Y. Hurel (ULiège), dans le cadre du cycle « Que veut (et que peut) encore l’éducation aux médias ? »
9 février 2022
Une conférence-débat de Jan Teurlings (U. Amsterdam) et P.-Y. Hurel (ULiège), dans le cadre du cycle « Que veut (et que peut) encore l’éducation aux médias ? »
9 février 2022
Fake news is commonly recognized to be a direct generator of controversy as well as the “discursive events” (Calabrese 2018) that feed and structure it. The identification of fake news through media coverage then implicitly becomes the embodiment of critical thinking; along those lines, the act of identifying fake news turns into a set way of preserving the public’s ability to take stand on the democratic issues involved. However, I wish to draw attention to the observation according to which, despite this apparently close relationship between controversy and so-called fake news, discussing a public controversy around that frame does not fuel the debate, but rather tends to neutralize it, on a political level.
Soon after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel coronavirus was described as a “stealth virus” because those who carry it are highly contagious before they show any signs of infection. This is indeed a major public health issue: If people are contagious well before they show any symptoms, strategies of contact tracing and containment are bound to play catch-up. However, the label of the “stealth virus” was also instrumentalized, especially in political rhetoric, to insinuate a lack of transparency of the virus itself. This post briefly explores how the label of the “stealth virus” was rhetorically weaponized for political purposes.