“Strategic Lying”: The Case of Brexit and the 2019 U.K. Election

Abstract

The final days of the Trump presidency and its aftermath brought into sharp focus the issue of political lying. Politicians have historically employed rhetoric and rhetorical spin to embellish the truth and hide damaging information. However, outright lying has traditionally been deemed politically too risky, resulting in resignation and the undermining of public trust. In contrast, recent electoral successes —the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the 2019 general election in the United Kingdom, and Trump's victory in 2016 and his increased electoral support in 2020—point to an apparent growing tendency for politicians caught lying not to be punished at the ballot box. Using the U.K. Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election as its case study, this conceptual paper argues that strategic political lying has been designed as a priming device to set the news agenda. As an effective campaigning tactic “strategic lying” represents a development of political spin—first evident in the mass media era—that has been intensified by the increasing professionalization of political communications and the rise of social media. In doing so, the concept of “strategic lying” theorized here contributes to deepening our understanding of the ongoing evolution of “spin” in the digital era.

Referendum Campaigns in the Digital Age: Towards (More) Comparative Analyses in Hybrid Media Systems

“…In the biggest research strand, scholars have focused on the patterns of news coverage, essentially evaluating the quality of media coverage across a broad set of indicators (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2012;Marquis et al, 2011) or focusing on one or few indicators, such as balance (e.g., Cushion & Lewis, 2017), the existence of issue frames instead of game frames (Dekavalla, 2018), dialogue (e.g., Hänggli, 2020), or topic diversity (e.g., Udris et al, 2016). While content analyses with core indicators of media quality have increasingly become complex and nuanced, they do not provide detailed insights on the quality of argumentation (one exception is Renwick & Lamb, 2013), a feature which is considered necessary for issue-focused referendum campaigns and threatened by politicians' "strategic lying" (Gaber & Fisher, 2021). For instance, Maia (2009) captured the number of arguments used in media texts but did not assess the validity or accuracy of arguments.…”

The World Isn’t Fair, but Shouldn’t Elections Be? Evaluating Prospective Beliefs about the Fairness of Elections and Referenda

“…Yet, it would, in our view, be unwise to discount the information in Table 2 as reflecting merely subjective beliefs without roots in objective fact. Respondents may well be motivated in their responses by their observation of matters that are perhaps not illegal yet could very well be considered as patently unfair; things such as pervasive use in campaigns of misinformation and untruths or attempts at character assassination [41,42]. They could even be motivated by flagrant violations of clear and legally binding rules, which may either not be discovered by authorities at all or may be discovered so long after the fact they were effectively unsanctioned for the conduct of the election in question [43].…”

El fact-checking en castellano

“…Estudios recientes señalan la gravedad de esta situación en lo referente a la participación política y la toma de decisiones que afectan de manera colectiva, poniendo al debate sobre el Brexit o las elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos de 2016 como los hitos referentes al uso político de la desinformación, y la escasez de herramientas ciudadanas para detectar el engaño y la manipulación (Bessi & Ferrara 2016;Howard & Kollanyi, 2016;Howard et al, 2018). Al analizar los casos del Brexit, las elecciones de Estados Unidos de 2016 y de Reino Unido de 2019, Gaber & Fisher (2021) han llegado a hablar de la mentira como estrategia política, cuyo único fin es el de controlar la agenda y lograr votos. Esta táctica, señalan, "representa un desarrollo de giro político, primero evidente en la era de los medios de comunicación de masas, que se ha intensificado por la creciente profesionalización de comunicación política y el auge de las redes sociales" (Gaber & Fisher, 2021, p. 460) Ella llamaba al mostrador de información de la biblioteca pública para "casi cualquier cosa" y estaba allí con regularidad hasta que cerraba.…”