Weapons of Mass Deception

Mistrust of the democratic electoral process has become rampant among Americans, particularly Republican voters. This trend carries profound consequences: widespread disputes over election results and resistance to the peaceful transfer of power threaten to undermine the very fabric of American democracy. It is, therefore, essential to understand why mistrust is spreading. No analysis is complete without a thorough accounting of the role of right-wing media in US politics. Weapons of Mass Deception challenges the conventional wisdom that right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News and Fox News function primarily as news organizations, using empirical analysis to demonstrate how they more closely resemble political organizations. Analyzing nearly four million online articles published by thirty major right-wing media outlets, Yunkang Yang finds that disinformation consistently ranked among the highest engagement stories between 2017 and 2020. Internal emails, Federal Election Commission filings, legal documents, and conversations between right-wing media employees illuminate the organizational patterns and practices underlying this data. Yang highlights the risk of "privatized political patronage," as platforms pursue both profits and strategic political objectives on behalf of their funders, owners, managers, and political allies. He further reveals the complexities of the right-wing media sphere and argues that when these goals align across networks, they can form a powerful political machine capable of misleading millions of Americans. Ultimately, this book reveals how organizations spread disinformation for partisan aims by exploiting the credibility afforded to traditional journalism, and it lays the framework for understanding how disparate right-wing media outlets coalesce into a unified weapon of mass deception.

Yunkang Yang (Ph.D., Communication, University of Washington) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University. His research uses quantitative and computational methods with large-scale digital media datasets to examine the disruptive role of media in American politics. Professor Yang serves on the editorial board of Political Communication and was a fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in the summer of 2023. In 2022, during his postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University, he submitted his research on right-wing media to the United States House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack.