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Among work published between January 2018 and December 2019 in Sociological Inquiry, "Conspiracies beyond Fake News. Produsing Reinformation on Presidential Elections in the Transnational Hybrid Media System" is among the top 10% most downloaded papers. As presidential elections carry the promise of distilling the contested and elusive 'will of the people', the protracted media event intensifies the public demand for exposing the transgressions of the aspiring political elite. This expectation provides fertile ground for investigative journalism, ultrapartisan smear campaigns, fake news, and full-fledged conspiracy theories that are sometimes difficult to differentiate from one another in a hybridized media space. We compare three unique conspiracy stories - Macronleaks, Pizzagate, and Voter fraud - emerging during the previous French and American elections. We assess the divergent strategies of social action that contribute to the stories' dissimilar patterns for intervening the political news cycle with the 'reinformative toolkit' and deconstruct the common conspiratorial 'masterplot' for 'reinforming' the public. Focusing on online 'produsers' - media users functioning as (dis)information producers - we analyze how the grassroots level participated in shaping the conspiracy stories' synopses and channeling news-framed, conspiratory content between mainstream and 'countermedia' outlets.

The efforts of the Reagan Administration to cut government funding for the arts and the social sciences reflects not only a general desire to curtail government spending but also a specific conservative effort to “defund the Left” by eliminating especially those programs regarded by conservatives as the basic source of liberal and radical social change in the United States. This paper examines the conservative animus against government support for the arts and the social sciences. The discussion has four parts: The first traces the history of contemporary American conservatism and identifies its central ideological themes. The second argues that the belief that government and intellectuals are the two main sources of liberal social change has led conservatives to target government programs allegedly guilty of social activism and to develop their own relatively autonomous counterintellectual network. The third examines how this political agenda and institutional structure have influenced conservative opposition to government funding of the social sciences and the arts. The final part suggests some implications our analysis has for defending the social sciences and the arts.