WHAT IS STILL FAKE IN THE MEDIA: A CHANGE OVER 20-YEARS’ TIME

Abstract

In the modern world of high technologies, real opportunities and open information,fake becomes an integral part of life and one of the consequences of human activity. The age of excessive information and quick accessibility to any facts and news is concurrently the time of deficiencies. A lot of information which is obtained is insufficient, misleading, ambiguous, deceptive and absolutely fake. ‘Fake’ tends to substitute more and more real thing, notions and events and to modify real-life communication. It misleads, manipulates, misinforms, makes you believe in the possibility of “multiplicity of truths” and suggests the existence of multiple realities.

The research offers a corpus-based analysis of collocations with FAKE in ‘The Economist’ issues published in 2001 and 2021. The two corpora have been processed with the help of Sketch Engine. The results obtained demonstrate a great shift in the media discourse within the 20-year period picturing what is fake. Only two things prove to be fake in both years: fake ID and fake card. In the year 2001 the main focus is on fake photography, image, watch, product. However, in the year 2021 the predominant topic is fake news, then there go the following collocations: fake information, link, account, order, divorce, personality, degree, certificate, medicine and vaccine. It seems that the frequency use has changed, 37 and 57 cases of FAKE as an adjective in the year 2001 and 2021 respectively.Collocations having a positive meaning in newspaper articles published in 2001 are the following fake pancreas, fake target, fake (threat) image, neutral collocations are fake parapets, fake pigeons, fake houses, fake waterway, and negative – fake Ids, fake documentation, fake profits, fake jobs, fake cuppa, fake watches, fake products; while in 2021 all collocations with FAKE are marked as negative (fake medicine, fake vaccine, fake ids, fake certificates,fake data, fake account, etc.).FAKE news proves to be the most frequently collocation in the media discourse of 2021.

Keywords: fake, corpus analysis, collocations, media discourse, The Economist