The term fake news is relatively fresh. It became popular during Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. The term has undertook many different and substantially opposite meanings, because many different actors, such as the media, politics, academics and public have been using it. It has therefore become a floating signifier in the discursive struggle. Its meaning encompasses disinformation in digital era, a label for discrediting traditional media and a buzzword to denote something generally untrue, etc. The aim of this master's thesis is to transfer the phenomenon of semantic dimensions of fake news into the Slovenian environment by analysing a sample of journalistic articles with discursive analysis, and by conducting semi-structured interviews with their authors to grasp the understanding of the term's meaning by the journalists. I found out that the term fake news undertakes many different meanings in the analysed articles - from online disinformation to lies and incorrect statements. While journalists do recognize ambiguity of the term, they neither address it nor present their own definitions in the articles. The readers are therefore forced to create their own definitions, while being subjected to a before-mentioned discursive struggle. What is more, the interviewed journalists are not unanimous in their definitions of the term. Their understanding of it ranges from deliberate misleading statements by political actors, to unintentional errors in journalistic reporting. Due to semantic ambiguities, I suggest further exploration of the phenomenon, perhaps with a focus on semantic dimensions of the term's understanding by the audience.
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