Visual rough news: The semiotic issue of generic video reuses in TV news

Abstract This paper aims to study the role of generic reuses of archival material as a form of misinformation. It looks at how fake news is the epiphenomenon of a media infrastructure based on a general inaccurate reuse of audiovisual archives that can lead to stereotypical or emblematic representations. We call these instances visual rough news. In order to understand their semiotic effects, we propose to conceptualise a polarity between specific and generic uses of images. Whereas the former precisely indicates the spatio-temporal coordinates of the represented event, the latter does so in an approximate or vague manner. Based on a corpus of 35,000 reuses of video content in French and Italian TV news about the EU, we observe how generic uses of images are dominant and can produce problematic visual forms. We argue that such uses constitute forms of disinformation, as they frame information in a biased manner. Three case studies in which different figures are stereotyped due to the approximate use of stock shots will be analysed.