Delegitimizing the media? Analyzing politicians' media criticism on social media

A growing literature on the impact of "fake news" accusations on legacy news outlets suggests that the use of this term is part of a much larger trend of increased and delegitimizing media criticism by political actors. How-ever, so far, there is very little empirical evidence on how prevailing politi-cians' delegitimizing media criticism really is and under which conditions it occurs. To fill these gaps, we present results of a content analysis of media -related Facebook postings by Austrian and German politicians in 2017 (N= 2,921). The results suggest that media criticism, in general, is actually rare and that about half of it can be described as delegitimizing (i.e., charac-terized by incivility or absence of argumentation). Most often, media criti-cism is used by populist politicians, who accuse "the media" in general of bias and falsehoods.