Media criticism is a crucial part of meta-journalistic discourse, ensuring that journalists adhere to their democratic functions, such as informing citizens in an honest and complete manner. However, the profession increasingly faces hostile, nonevidence-based attacks from politicians that attempt to strategically fuel distrust among citizens and delegitimize opposed viewpoints. Despite this reality, we lack a systematic overview of the boundaries between constructive feedback and weaponized attacks in media criticism. To address this gap, we inductively analyzed how media criticism is represented within the social media discourse of ten German politicians from all major parties. Using a grounded theory approach, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of a subset of their tweets from 2015, 2017, and 2022 that contain media criticism ( N = 545), mapping the types and severity of the criticism, the construction of opposing narratives, and the explicitness of references to facticity over opinions. We identified four themes within media criticism discourse, ranging from misinformation attributions to severe accusations of the intentional distortion of reality through the media. Politicians (strategically) employ a wide range of media criticism and inaccuracy claims beyond judgments of facticity with differing degrees of severity for the profession. Based on our findings, we propose a typology of media criticism from political elites that adds nuance to our understanding regarding the boundaries between supportive and disruptive criticism for journalism.

中文翻译：

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超越“Lügenpresse”：德国政客如何批评和剥夺媒体的合法性


媒体批评是元新闻话语的重要组成部分，确保记者遵守其民主职能，例如以诚实和完整的方式告知公民。然而，该行业越来越多地面临来自政客的敌对、非证据攻击，这些政客试图战略性地助长公民之间的不信任并使反对的观点失去合法性。尽管存在这一现实，但我们缺乏对媒体批评中建设性反馈和武器化攻击之间界限的系统概述。为了解决这一差距，我们归纳分析了媒体批评如何在来自所有主要政党的 10 位德国政治家的社交媒体话语中得到体现。使用扎根理论方法，我们对他们在 2015 年、2017 年和 2022 年包含媒体批评的推文子集 （N = 545） 进行了定性内容分析，绘制了批评的类型和严重性、对立叙述的构建以及对事实性的明确引用而不是观点。我们在媒体批评话语中确定了四个主题，从错误信息的归因到对媒体故意歪曲现实的严重指责。政客们（战略性地）在事实性判断之外，采用了广泛的媒体批评和不准确的说法，对这个行业的严重性程度不同。根据我们的研究结果，我们提出了一种来自政治精英的媒体批评类型学，这为我们理解对新闻业的支持性和破坏性批评之间的界限增加了细微差别。