Beyond "Lügenpresse": How politicians criticize and delegitimize the media in Germany

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.