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.