ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
This article is part of the Research TopicMedia Under Fire: Right-Wing Populist Digital HostilityView all articles
Media under fire on private networks: how the far right is stealthily destroying the reputation of news organizations on WhatsApp
Provisionally accepted
- Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil
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This study seeks to understand how private communication networks, particularly WhatsApp, have been used to disseminate attacks against the media and individual journalists. Using Brazil as a case study, it draws on a database of more than 87,000 messages exchanged in 40 far-right political discussion groups on WhatsApp and employs three complementary analytical stages: (1) a content analysis combined with descriptive statistics on the circulation and sharing of 38,000 news links from hyperpartisan and politically biased media; (2) a lexical analysis based on n-gram co-occurrences to examine references to press organizations; and (3) a interpretative analysis of nominal and individual mentions targeting mainstream journalists. Drawing on these data, the article sheds light on how users perceive mainstream media and how attacks on the press create the conditions for an alternative far-right media ecosystem to emerge. It argues that a coordinated effort to undermine the credibility of news organizations operates through three interrelated strategies: (a) harassment and political violence against journalists; (b) recurring incitement of public hostility toward the press; and (c) the consolidation of a hyperpartisan media environment that systematically spreads disinformation, hate speech, and political proselytism.
Keywords: Bolsonaro5, far-right alternative media2, politically hyper-biasedmedia3, violence against journalists1, WhatsApp4
Received: 10 Nov 2025; Accepted: 22 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Chagas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Viktor Chagas
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