“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!” An Automated Analysis of Polarities of Mediated Truth Contestation in Austrian and Czech News Media

This paper analyzes the discursive dynamics of mediated truth contestation by examining how assertions of truthfulness and references to falsehood are constructed in Austrian and Czech news coverage of migration. Employing automated content analysis on an extensive dataset of 162,943 news articles (2013–2019), we apply latent semantic scaling to assess differences between tabloid and broadsheet newspapers and between mainstream and alternative news media, investigating how media formats and media types shape the discursive construction of truthfulness and falsehoods in news articles. We further use named entity recognition techniques to examine the role of populist politicians, government representatives, and EU actors in mediated truth contestation, and consider cross-national differences to investigate how political contexts influence these dynamics. By integrating insights from political communication and computational text analysis, this study contributes to debates on post-truth politics, media polarization, and the strategic use of truth and lies in democratic discourse.