Folk Theories of Journalistic Authority in the Wake of the 2024 Valencia Floods

This paper uses discourse analysis to analyze folk theories of journalistic authority—that is, lay beliefs about when and why journalism should be listened to (Carlson, 2017)—that circulated on TikTok in the wake of catastrophic floods in 2024 in Valencia, Spain. Many citizens took to social media to criticize the institutional response to the crisis, including the news coverage. Our analysis of that media criticism reveals three folk theories of journalistic authority dominated this discourse: that journalists have a duty to tell the truth; a duty to hold political actors to account; and a duty to care for citizens in need. Our analysis further shows that TikTokers used these folk theories to construct their own authority—by showing that they themselves uphold these duties where professional journalists fall short—and do so in ways that comply with social media logics, thus generating engagement to the benefit of themselves and social media platforms, but at the expense of the journalistic authority of the mainstream news media.