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Fake news, post-truth and media–political change

Media researchers may well experience a degree of difficulty in relating to the strident arrival of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ as key markers of the current media–political situation, the focus both of countless commentaries in newspapers and magazines and a spate of new books. After all, questions about the contingency and precariousness of what is publicly circulated as the ‘truth’ have long been central to research across both the cultural studies’ and the more sociological strands of international media inquiry. Similarly, the idea of news involving a good measure of often deliberately counterfeit information, as a result of journalistic practices themselves or the strategies of deception used by sources, is very familiar too. It is perhaps necessary to note the difference between the ‘post-truth’ label and ‘fake news’ despite the lines of interconnection. ‘Post-truth’ is a self-consciously grand term of epochal shift (trading heavily on assumptions about an ‘era of truth’ we apparently once enjoyed). As Philip Schlesinger (2017) recently pointed out in this journal, despite its limitations, its rise as an idea ‘has signalled a perception of change both in how the public domain is constituted and in the conduct of major protagonists in the media-political sphere’ (p. 603). A change does indeed seem to be occurring but the more tightly that the focus is placed on the political sphere, perhaps the less the sense of shock that should be delivered by the phrase given the long and amply documented history of strategic deception here. ‘Fake news’, however, seems a snappy identifier of a kind of a fraudulent media product (the negative judgement and the sense of intention are even stronger than