TY - JOUR AU - Pérez-Curiel, Concha AU - Domí­nguez-Garcí­a, Ricardo AU - Velasco-Molpeceres, Ana-Marí­a PY - 2021/12/16 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - High-quality journalism in the face of Donald Trump´s theory of electoral fraud: the information strategy of the media in the 2020 US presidential election JF - Profesional de la información / Information Professional JA - EPI VL - 30 IS - 6 SE - Artí­culos de investigación / Research articles DO - 10.3145/epi.2021.nov.19 UR - https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/article/view/86477 SP - AB - <p>The institutional political crisis is posited to be a great risk facing twenty-first-century societies. The instability of democracy, the increase in misinformation in electoral processes, and distrust by citizens are facts that are confirmed by studies such as <em>The Economist Intelligence Unit</em> (2018) or <em>Freedom in the World </em>(2018). In the context of the most recent US elections (3-Nov-2020), President Donald Trump initiated a dialog focused on an allegation of electoral fraud that mobilized the masses and culminated in an assault on the Capitol. In parallel, <em>Twitter</em> endorses the role of journalism (@ABC, @AP, @CBSNews, @CNN, @FoxNews, @NBCNews, and @Reuters) as a gatekeeper to lies on the Internet. The aim of this study is to determined how the media treated the electoral process on their <em>Twitter</em> accounts, analyze the strategies they followed to combat Trump´s fallacy, and verify the extent to which they contributed or not to the spread of the conspiracy theory. Using a general sample of tweets (n1 = 3,577), we applied a comparative content analysis methodology with a three-pronged approach (quantitative-qualitative-discursive) based on the use of keyword indicators (n2 = 34,430). The results confirm that the media offered verified content on the electoral process, using different sources and avoiding reproduction of Donald Trump´s delegitimization speech. In general, they engaged in a fight against the theory of electoral fraud, against disinformation, and against the polarization of citizens, which are factors that have marked a scenario of doubt about the future of democracy.</p> ER -