The Patina of Distrust

The MIT Press eBooks · 2025-10-28

The dynamics of news reception during the 2019 Argentine elections, and how distrust of the media can protect audiences from both misinformation and attempts to correct it. The year 2016 marked a profound turning point in global politics: In June, the United Kingdom voted in favor of Brexit, choosing to leave the European Union. Just five months later, the United States elected Donald Trump as its president. In the wake of these momentous events, a prevailing narrative emerged, which focused on the role of misinformation in reshaping political landscapes. However, a critical aspect of this phenomenon remained unexplored—the dynamics of reception. In The Patina of Distrust, Eugenia Mitchelstein, Pablo Boczkowski, María Celeste Wagner, and Facundo Suenzo dive deep into this overlooked facet by zeroing in on the reception of misinformation. Central to the book is the development of the concept of “patina of distrust.” Much like the protective layer that accumulates over time on artworks, this societal patina serves as a buffer, shielding audiences to some extent from the harmful effects of misinformation and the attempts to rectify it. This book offers a historically grounded mixed methods study of news reception in Argentina’s 2019 presidential election, drawing from interviews, survey data, and experiments. The authors also include a coda that addresses the pandemic and the election of current Argentine president Javier Milei in 2023, bringing the analysis up to date with the current right-wing populist moment.

‘Virtuality is a Matter of Class’: sociological determinants of teletherapy in mental health work

Information Communication & Society · 2025-12-09

Prelims

2023-02-06

Now that digital media connect or disconnect our everyday lives within and across contexts, then the task of their users is to navigate these new opportunities, smartphone in hand, so as to enjoy new choices, face the at-time intense tensions and dilemmas that result, and orientate to a changing world as resourcefully as possible.In this carefully-researched book, Brita Ytre-Arne puts people at the heart of her insightful and empathetic dissection of modern life."

Digital Journalism in Latin America

2023-01-24 · 2 citations

Index

The MIT Press eBooks · 2023-04-18

collapse" (Marwick), 155 Convergence and divergence, 35 Convergence culture, 62

Introduction

2023-01-24

Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order. Diversity across journalistic cultures do not cease at the country level. García-Perdomo looks into the online operations of two major Colombian TV organizations through ethnographic work and in-depth interviews. The interaction of audiences with news on digital platforms, and particularly on Facebook, is the focus of the research conducted by Vergara et al. Algorithms are not the only gatekeepers of exposure to news. Social filtering also plays a role, as Valenzuela, Bachmann, and Bargsted find in their panel survey on how users in Chile share content on WhatsApp during the 2017 presidential campaign. Despite warnings about echo chambers of digital platforms, increased use of WhatsApp for political content was not associated with increased issue position extremity.

To Know Is to Compare

The MIT Press eBooks · 2023-03-03 · 47 citations

How systematic comparative research can unlock the potential of social media scholarship. Though diverse and fruitful, social media scholarship too often focuses on single platforms in single countries, disconnected from other media that people use. Mora Matassi and Pablo J. Boczkowski's alternative approach offers a framework based on the epistemological principle that everything we know emerges from comparing two or more entities. Drawing on a wealth of real-life cases, Matassi and Boczkowski examine key aspects of social media from three comparative dimensions (nations, media, and platforms) and two topics (history and language) to propose a blueprint that encourages researchers and lay readers alike to think about social media from new perspectives. Matassi and Boczkowski illustrate their theoretical points with examples that link multiple media, illuminate an array of platforms, cover different countries and eras, and address various languages and both textual and non-textual signifiers. The result is an original conceptual account that allows for the study of social media in ways that are global, de-westernized, transmedia, and multiplatform. In addition, the authors review the major texts that use a comparative treatment and suggest topics, theories, and methods for engaging in comparative studies in the future.

Trust-oriented affordances: A five-country study of news trustworthiness and its socio-technical articulations

New Media & Society · 2022-06-07 · 39 citations

Research on trust has come to the forefront of communication studies. Beyond the dominant focus on informational trust and its country-specific articulations, trustworthiness evaluations can relate to the materiality of news and its global manifestations. Especially in digital algorithmic environments, understanding news trustworthiness requires a holistic approach, which combines informational and socio-technical aspects while addressing both institutional and interpersonal trust. Drawing on 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States, this article investigates news (dis)trust from the lens of socio-materiality. The six trust-oriented affordances we identified—selectivity, interactivity, customization, searchability, information abundance, and immediacy—reveal important socio-technical commonalities that underlie news trust across countries. These affordances, moreover, point to an interplay of trust and self-agency. Taken together, the findings illuminate the lived experience of news trust as manifested across cultures and offer a broader understanding of trustworthiness within current media ecology.

Haz lo que yo digo pero no lo que yo hago: 30 años de cobertura de regulación estatal de medios en Argentina

CIC Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación · 2022-06-17

La independencia del periodismo y el pluralismo son componentes fundamentales de la libertad de expresión, invocados de manera frecuente por los medios de comunicación para defender o criticar propuestas de regulación de medios. Sin embargo, la cobertura mediática sobre este tema ha recibido escasa atención por parte de los estudios de política públicas. Este trabajo analiza la evolución de la cobertura sobre regulación de medios en los diarios argentinos Clarín y Página/12 a lo largo de cuatro décadas, para dar cuenta de los cambios y continuidades en el discurso sobre independencia editorial en dos medios. Para ello, se examinan los artículos publicados durante los años 1988, 1998, 2008 y 2018 sobre regulación y proyectos de regulación de medios y telecomunicaciones (n=140). Este trabajo contribuye a la literatura sobre los vínculos entre los ideales y la práctica periodística, identificando la utilización de diferentes estrategias de los dos diarios para defender su posición a lo largo de los años analizados. En las conclusiones, reflexiona sobre la distancia entre el ideal periodístico y la práctica profesional, en una escena mediática concentrada y polarizada.

Social media repertoires: Social structure and platform use

The Information Society · 2022-01-31 · 24 citations

We analyze how the size and composition of social media repertoires is associated with key sociodemographic variables: age, gender, socioeconomic status, education, and occupation. Specifically, we ask what is the association between these variables and: (a) social media use as a whole, (b) the number of platforms people include in their social media repertoires, (c) the platforms included in such repertoires, and (d) the most prevalent repertoires? To answer these questions, we analyze data from an in-person survey (N = 700) about use of media and communication technologies conducted in 2016 in Argentina by a polling firm. Our findings indicate that: (a) the odds of using social media are higher among younger people, women, those with higher socioeconomic and educational levels, and those employed; (b) whereas an increase in age is associated with a decrease in the size of the repertoire, higher educational attainment is associated with an increase in the number of platforms included in the repertoire; (c) age, gender, education, and occupation are significantly associated with the inclusion of different platforms in the repertoire; and (d) some of these variables are significant for the uptake of different repertoires, but not others. We interpret these findings drawing upon scholarship about digital inequalities and social media repertoires, and we assess and reflect on their implications for research on the digital divide.