The ‘post-truth politics’ diversion : ‘what does the journalistic discourse on post-truth politics reveal in its portrayal of technology as ‘disrupting the truth?’’

Abstract

This thesis argues that the journalistic ‘post-truth politics’ discourse is conditioned by logocentric, positivistic and paradoxical presuppositions about (journalistic) representation, new media and the public sphere. The positivist discourse insinuates that media can uncompromisingly and logocentrically represent reality. The discourse justifies and reinforces its logocentric and positivist ideology by holding on to a false-nostalgic conception of the public sphere, presupposing its idealized existence and seeing it as a truth producing structure. Therefore, in the discourse, a disruption of the public sphere – primarily blamed on new media – is seen as a disruption of the truth, and vice versa. The corpus’ ideology and presuppositions refrain them from seeing that a truth-producing public sphere is not only an illusion, it is undesirable, as it is the opportunity of questioning truth which qualifies a system as democratic. Ironically, in presupposing that there is a ‘truth-producing public sphere’ the corpus is constructing a normative discourse on truth, escalating the true/false dichotomy (in the media), paving the way for populists and demagogues.