Against Post-Truth: An Empirical-Theoretical Inquiry into News Media (Politics, Media and Political Communication)

Against Post-Truth: An Empirical-Theoretical Inquiry into News Media delivers a refreshingly critical perspective on the post-truth debate, challenging the naturalized status of this concept as an epochal crisis in contemporary epistemology, media and politics.

By subverting the very logic behind such a diagnosis, this book refuses to look at post-truth as a taken-for-granted phenomenon and rather focuses on the way the term was concretely conceptualized and talked about. This book traces the historical trajectory of the neologism, critically dissects its interpretations in academia and media and analyses nearly 1,700 articles from Italian and British news outlets in search for the meanings and the subjectivities associated with the term. Drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory and culturalist cognitive sociology, it reveals how the “post-truth discourse” simplifies complex phenomena and identities, overemphasizes the deviant side of the debate, builds on problematic premises and ultimately obscures critical questions about truth, knowledge and democracy.

Against Post-Truth is crafted in clear and accessible language and will be of interest to scholars and students in media studies, political theory, philosophy and discourse analysis. It equips readers with conceptual tools to critically deconstruct the common post-truth narratives and provides valuable insights for navigating the challenges and anxieties of our time without falling into simplistic or utopian solutions.

Matteo De Toffoli holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Pisa, and is a librarian at the University of Milan. His research interests revolve around post-structuralist discourse theory and the public use of concepts such as post-truth, conspiracy theories and populism, with a particular focus on their repercussions on democratic politics.