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Abstract

Since the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit vote, media scholarship has lamented the state of democratic public communication. Scholars have used the concepts ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ to describe the cocktail of disinformation and devaluation of facts. This article illustrates how ruptures in democratic public communication stem from the contradictions characterising liberalism and its ‘regime of truth’. Liberalism has oscillated between efforts to discipline the media market with such techniques as professional journalism and, on the other hand, the attempt to enhance the position of the market mechanism as a superior knowledge processor. The article builds on the thinking of Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, two influential liberal thinkers with differing ideas on the role of experts in society. Moreover, Karl Polanyi's concept of ‘double movement’ is used to argue that the problems regarding public communication are systemic features of liberal media logics.

Keywords

Fake news post-truth regime of truth liberalism double movement

Introduction

In 2016, the election of Donald Trump as US president and the Brexit vote sent shockwaves through the liberal status quo. Defying the expectations of pundits and many pollsters, Trump and Brexit undermined many of the central ideals of post-World War II liberalism, such as free trade. Common wisdom concerning rational political participation was effectively pushed aside by Anglo-American publics, driven by popular resentment and economic inequality (Davies, 2019). The crisis of the political centre after the financial crisis of 2008 manifested itself in the ‘populist moment’ (Mouffe, 2018) and the surges of anti-establishment forces.

As politics and democratic deliberation in complex mass societies are mediated by traditional and digital media, many have turned to an analysis of public communication to find explanations for democratic disruptions. Scholars have analysed the effects of fake news and misinformation on democratic processes (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Bovet and Makse, 2019; Humprecht, 2019). Media market deregulation and declining journalistic resources have contributed to the rise of Trump and the deterioration of a critical public sphere (Freedman, 2018; Pickard, 2018). Social media has provided a platform for reactionary politics, trolling and harassment (Hannan, 2018; Lewis, 2020; Seymour, 2019). The debate over ‘filter bubbles’ (Groshek and Koc-Michalska, 2017; Haim et al., 2018), where like-minded people coalesce, has further deepened a sense of despondency regarding the democratic effects of digital media. Importantly, the concepts ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ have been used to characterise the state of democratic societies. Post-truth and fake news describe a rupture in the liberal system of political communication, a system regulated for most of the 20th century by journalists and experts (Waisbord, 2018).

Media scholarship has addressed post-truth and fake news as a sign of the deterioration of liberal rationalist principles. This article, however, argues that the fake news and post-truth debate has underplayed the notion that the concerns regarding democratic public communication stem from the inherent contradictions of liberalism and its way of regulating knowledge and public debate. This article takes Foucault's concept of liberalism's ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980: 131) as a starting point to broaden the debate on post-truth and fake news. The article argues that when it comes to public communication, liberal societies have relied on the competitive market as the most effective way of determining the truth (Mavelli, 2020). Simultaneously, however, liberalism has relied on a hierarchical system of truth-telling, the legitimacy of which is not based on market principle but on the ability to create and disseminate facts in an objective matter (Davies, 2019; Foucault, 1980: 131–2).

From these premises, the structure of this article is as follows. To lay the groundwork for the argument, the article will briefly address the scholarship on fake news and post-truth. The article then shows how the regime of truth perspective is useful in the debate on fake news and post-truth. After that, the article turns to Walter Lippmann's thinking on journalism, democracy and public opinion. With the help of Lippmann, the article shows how professional journalism emerged at the beginning of the 20th century as a means of regulating liberalism's regime of truth. To illustrate the contradictory nature of the liberal regime of truth, the article draws from Friedrich Hayek, whose liberal thinking was marked by a critique of expertise (Hayek, 1945). From a Hayekian perspective, knowledge and truth are not ideas to be found in the heads of detached experts, but notions vetted by ‘truth markets’ (Harsin, 2015), where the needs of individual market actors determine their usefulness.

This article situates the post-truth and fake news debate in the Lippmann–Hayek nexus. The article argues that the 21st-century media market works as a Hayekian information processor that disrupts established liberal gate-keeping institutions, such as journalism. The article finally illustrates this logic with the help of Karl Polanyi ([1944] 2001) and his notion about the ‘double movement’ of liberal capitalism. According to Polanyi, liberal capitalist societies are marked by a pendulum swinging between attempts to bring aspects of social life under market rule and the need to protect social life from the corroding effects of market logics. From a double movement perspective, the article contributes to the existing critical scholarship on post-truth and fake news (e.g. Bratich, 2020; Farkas and Schou, 2019; Mejia et al., 2018) and argues that problems pertaining to public communication should be seen as systemic issues rooted in the contradictory logics of the liberal media system. Such an outlook should make it possible to circumvent some of the ‘moral panics’ (Bratich, 2020) and technological determinism (see Farkas and Schou, 2019) characterising dominant post-truth and fake news discourses and, instead, bring to the fore structural questions regarding liberal democracy and media systems (Fenton, 2018).

Post-truth and fake news

In liberal democratic societies, media is given various democratic functions, such as providing a setting for a deliberative ‘public sphere’ (Habermas, 1989) where different ideas concerning politics can be voiced. Professional journalism has been entrusted with the role of upholding a rational public debate, keeping an eye on the political and economic elite, and providing citizens with critical analyses on current affairs (Schudson, 2008). Of course, journalism often falls short of these idealisations, but the standard view is that a liberal democratic regime is dependent on journalism to provide people with reliable information (McNair, 2008).

Fake news and post-truth signal a crisis of the liberal democratic system of public communication. Donald Trump has used ‘fake news’ to dismiss established journalism, whereas his critics have used the term to characterise the false information circulating in the right-wing online media sphere (Farkas and Schou, 2018). The meaning of the concept is indeed somewhat vague, and fake news can refer to manipulation, fabrication, propaganda and even news satire (Tandoc Jr. et al., 2018). There are different views on whether fake news is deliberate political propaganda or simply fabricated content created to drive online traffic (Farkas and Schou, 2019: 54; Mirowski, 2019). The concept has also been described as a ‘genre’ blending traditional news elements with sensationalism, misinformation and bias (Mourão and Robertson, 2019).

However, it is safe to say that since the election of Trump and the Brexit vote, fake news has referred to false or misleading news stories created to advance political or economic interests (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Jankowski, 2018). Online news consumers have become the targets and circulators of made-up or misleading news stories, with the potential of distorting democratic public communications (Carlson, 2020; McNair, 2019).

Post-truth refers to difficulties in public communication, too. However, post-truth refers to a more fundamental shift in the epistemic nature of society, disrupting institutions that have sought to construct accurate representations of the world. It is argued that in a post-truth world, the very foundations of liberal democracy have been disrupted due to declining trust in expertise and the rise of digital media. According to the Oxford Dictionaries – which named post-truth its ‘word of the year’ in 2016 – post-truth refers to circumstances ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016). In a post-truth world, the abundance of online content as well as the intensity and speed of digital communication have paved the way for an ‘epistemic crisis’ (Dahlgren, 2018) that erodes civic participation and thus democracy. Post-truth nullifies any claim to objectivity, as any utterance can be deemed biased. Thus, the modernist model of truth-telling comes ‘crashing down’ (Waisbord, 2018b: 3) as common ground and norms for democratic debate evaporate.

Recent scholarship has analysed the post-truth and fake news phenomena as a break from liberal communication ideals. According to Waisbord (2018b), ‘[p]ost-truth implies the rejection of modern liberal aspirations to establish truth across myriad issues and realms according to core premises of scientific expertise’ (p. 9). Farkas and Schou (2019) argue that the dominant fake news and post-truth discourses focus on the irrationality of mass publics, ‘disconnected from truth’ (p. 6) and driven to anti-liberal political decisions by viral social media content.

Many scholars have accurately noted how the difficulties in democratic public communication derive from long-term issues in democratic societies, such as declining confidence in elite institutions and the mushrooming of digital information channels (Bennett and Livingston, 2018; Waisbord, 2018b). However, thus far the scholarship has overlooked how the post-truth and fake news phenomena are embedded at the very core of liberalism. Here, a regime of truth perspective comes into play.

The liberal ‘regime of truth’

Foucault uses the concept of a ‘regime of truth’ to illustrate how each society has institutions that determine what is acknowledged as rational and truthful. Regime of truth refers to ‘the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; status of those who are charged with saying with what counts as true’ (Foucault, 1980: 131). It is generally thought that the contemporary liberal regime of truth has been grounded in the principles of the ‘scientific model’ (Waisbord, 2018b: 8), which has made it possible to claim that certain objective facts exist outside the realms of political contestation. Foucault's historical analyses on the use of power in modern societies show how power derives its efficiency not from the divine rights of rulers, but rather from the authority of expertise (Foucault, 1995). Media outlets have had a pivotal role in the liberal regime of truth (Jones, 2009: 128; Waisbord, 2018: 1869–70), and at the beginning of the 20th century journalists took their place in the ‘pyramidal system of mass production and distribution of information’ (Waisbord, 2018: 1870).

However, one should note that the liberal regime of truth has never been a regime simply dominated by expertise. The liberal regime of truth has been oscillating between scientific expertise and principles according to which the truth is determined by the market mechanism. To understand this friction, it is necessary to take a brief look at Foucault's writing on liberalism.

For Foucault, liberalism means the emergence of a ‘new type of rationality in the art of government’ (Foucault, 2008: 20). Foucault shows how from the 18th century onwards, the market came to be understood as the ‘site of truth’ (Foucault, 2008: 30), a means of deciding on the proper limits of regulation and governmental action. The liberal art of government, supported by the birth of political economy, began to conceptualise the market as something ‘spontaneous’ (Foucault, 2008: 31) that could produce a true market price and work as a means of determining the true value of things. In terms of good governmental principles and practice, this shift had enormous consequences. A good government was not merely a just government, but a government that worked according to a truth determined by the market (Foucault, 2008: 32).¹

Importantly, the liberal art of government is not merely about creating conditions for unchecked market freedom. Foucault (2008: 64) notes how the central contradiction concerning liberal governance stems from the need to mitigate between individual market freedoms and the social risks resulting from the use of those freedoms. Therefore, the central project of liberalism has been to establish disciplinary institutions and practices that turn liberal individuals into responsible, self-governing subjects. Liberalism has thus overseen the simultaneous emergence of economic freedom and such disciplinary institutions as schools, prisons and factories.

So, how does this then relate to the media? It is well known that gradually, from the 17th century onwards, the press came to be understood – in economic terms – as a ‘free marketplace of ideas’ (Nerone, 1995: 43), liberated from state censorship and used to advance the public exchange of ideas (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2008). In the liberal ‘public sphere’ (Habermas, 1989), members of the newly emerging bourgeois class would deliberate on common issues in a rational and critical matter. Ideally, this would eventually lead to an enlightened public opinion.

By the 19th century, the press had established itself as a liberal political force, a privately owned business that would inform citizens, express public opinion and keep an eye on the government (Ward, 2011: 97). In the liberal media market, free rational individuals would choose between competing arguments and the outcome of the process, guided by an ‘invisible hand’, would promote the common good (Nerone, 1995: 43). Ideally, a free exchange of ideas would lead to the emergence of truth, as falsehoods would be exposed and defeated.

The turn of the 20th century, however, saw a widespread disillusionment with the liberal regime of truth. Powerful press owners used papers to advance their own interests (Ward, 2011: 99–100). Instead of supporting a rational public debate, the mass media had distortive effects on public policy. Thus, the liberal regime of truth had to be brought under professional oversight.

Walter Lippmann, professional journalism and regulating the regime of truth

The early 20th century saw journalism emerging as a ‘disciplinary technique’ (Foucault, 2008: 67) in the liberal regime of truth. Like the military or the legislature, journalism became part of an apparatus that ‘maintained the social order’ (Nerone, 2015: 143). The work of Walter Lippmann provides an illuminating look into how journalism took its place as the professional regulator of the liberal media market.

Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), US journalist and political theorist, is perhaps one of the most influential thinkers in US journalism history (Schudson, 2001). Lippmann's writing on democracy, the press and public opinion in the 1920s shaped American journalism (and therefore Western journalism) as it developed into a professional practice.

In the 1920s, a historical conjuncture during which liberal democratic societies were undergoing severe economic and political upheavals, Lippmann ([1922] 1998), ([1927] 1993) offered a potent critique of liberal democracy. Lippmann paid attention to the sheer complexity of modern industrial societies, marked by transnational interdependency and high demand for expertise (Soderlund, 2005). Lippmann ([1927] 1993) argued that it was simply unreasonable to presume that the mass public would consist of ‘omnicompetent’ (p. 29) citizens who would form enlightened opinions on complex issues beyond their everyday experience. Experts – whose job it is not to serve private interests but to discover facts about the world – should therefore provide advice to the elected decision-makers. It should be accepted that the general public is a ‘step removed’ (Schudson, 2008b: 1033) from the everyday activities of democratic decision-making and participates in the democratic process primarily via electing the political decision-makers.

Lippmann pointed out that for people in mass democracies, the popular press had become the primary source of information on issues extending beyond everyday life. Therefore, political decision-makers had to pay close attention to the press as well. For Lippmann, the problem was that due to various structural reasons – concerning the dominant business model of the popular press, for example – the press put too much emphasis on conflicts and scandals (Malmberg, 2009). Instead of providing decisions-makers and citizens with accurate information, the profit-driven press pandered to prejudice and popular reflexes (Nerone, 2015b). This led Lippmann to wonder ‘whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise’ (Lippmann, 1920: 5). The media was quickly becoming a potential source of dangerous mass behaviour, and thus, it had to be disciplined to secure the foundations of a liberal democratic society. Lippmann called for an upgrade in the ‘professional dignity’ (Schudson, 2001: 163) of journalists and for subordination of the profession to the ideal of ‘objective testimony’ (Lippmann, 1920: 82).

Gradually, journalism would be transformed into an institution that would provide the intelligence demanded by modern democracy (Nerone, 2015b). The early 20th century saw the emergence of professional journalism, committed to such values as neutrality and balance (Kaplan, 2002). Journalists adopted the scientific worldview of liberal–progressive reformers, moved away from partisan positions and started to define themselves as an autonomous middle-class profession characterised by common ethical standards (Schudson, 2001; Waisbord, 2013). By serving the public good and subscribing to principles of ‘public interest’ (McQuail, 1992), journalists and publishers avoided heavy-handed state regulation and journalism remained a private industry. Journalists became the technocrats of the public sphere, vetting information and utterances before they reached the mass public (Kaplan, 2010). During the 20th century, this Anglo-American form of journalism gradually became the hegemonic form of Western professional journalism.²

The ability of such a ‘high-modernist’ (Hallin, 1992) strand of journalism to work as a disciplinary institution in the liberal regime of truth was supported by a set of historically contingent factors. From the mid-20th^hcentury onwards, Western media spheres were regulated by state authorities (van Cuilenburg and McQuail, 2003). Especially in Europe, broadcasting was dominated by public service providers, devoted to enlightening the mass publics, while in the US private broadcasters were saddled with regulations concerning, for example, journalistic balance (McQuail, 1992; Mills, 2016).

In terms of popular reports on current affairs, people had only a limited number of alternatives to professional journalism and regulated mass media. These lucrative ‘bottlenecks’ (Nerone, 2015b: 317) between information and mass publics were the financial backbone of 20th-century journalism. Furthermore, the gradual de-ideologisation of Western politics after the Second World War supported the ability of journalism to stand above the fray. Boundaries between the political left and the right were blurred, solidifying a centrist consensus among the political elite. Liberal journalism could imagine a public that, despite its differences, shared a commitment to political moderation (Raeijmaekers and Maeseele, 2017).

These cornerstones of journalism have, however, been in a constant state of flux since the 1970s and 1980s. Media policy has favoured deregulation and liberalisation measures to dismantle public broadcasting and telecommunication monopolies and to pave way for commercial media infrastructures with potentially global customer bases (Phelan, 2014). Journalism has lost its unique position as a popular source of knowledge. Meanwhile, due to the gradual decline of the post-World War II Keynesian policy consensus since the 1970s, publics have become more sceptical of established forms of expertise (Davies, 2019; Waisbord, 2018).

Together, these factors have contributed to shifts in democratic public communication. The ability of journalism to work as an ‘intelligence bureau’ (Nerone, 2015b: 320) – that would, in the spirit of Lippmann, provide the people with accurate information – has seen a steady decline. To understand this shift in the liberal regime of truth, it is helpful to briefly look at the work of the Austrian economist and intellectual Friedrich A. Hayek.

Friedrich Hayek and the liberal truth market

Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992), a Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974, has strongly influenced the liberal world order. As a founding member of the neoliberal thought collective The Mont Pelerin Society, the Austrian economist played a pivotal role in how liberalism unfolded throughout the mid-20th century. Scholars of neoliberalism have extensively analysed Hayek's role in the neoliberal political project that challenged the post-World War II Keynesian consensus (e.g. Van Horn and Mirowski, 2009).

Like Lippmann, Hayek was concerned about the state of liberal market societies at the beginning of the 20th century. After the Great Depression, two world wars and the breakdown of the colonial empires, popular calls for national sovereignty and the welfare state eclipsed liberal fantasies about a frictionless open-border world (Slobodian, 2018). Emphasis on state-led economic growth and technocratic planning was on the rise. From an underdog position, Hayek launched a forceful critique of dominant ideas on planning and the use of knowledge in society. Hayek attacked the notion that established scientific knowledge and experts could determine the public interest (Mavelli, 2020). Hayek argued that scientific knowledge ‘occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind [of knowledge] that is relevant’ (Hayek, 1945: 521).

Hayek pitted the idea of ‘unorganized knowledge’ (Hayek, 1945: 521) against that of scientific knowledge, which, unlike scientific knowledge, did not take the form of a detached expert but was dispersed among the multitude of individuals. This practical knowledge is harvested by ordinary people – entrepreneurs and workers, for instance – in their day-to-day activities to gain a competitive advantage or to resolve a problem at hand. Hayek argued that in their everyday lives, people make use of bits of knowledge not known to others. Therefore, experts and policymakers had only ‘limited knowledge’ (Slobodian, 2018: 232), whereas the ‘sublime’ (p. 225) market mechanism could allocate the endless bits of information to benefit the common good.

Whereas Lippmann envisaged a role for the detached technocrat as the manager of a liberal democratic society, Hayek argued that no number of experts can match the knowledge harnessed by individual market actors. Indeed, the market, in Hayekian thinking, is an ‘information processor’ (Mirowski, 2019: 6) that exceeds any human cognitive capabilities. Hayek ([1944] 2005) argued that any idea that experts or technocrats could govern or plan the market is merely a sign of dangerous hubris, which ultimately endangers human freedom and leads to tyranny (see also Mavelli, 2020).

According to Hayek, knowledge is a commodity to be used to advance individual interests in the competitive market. Knowledge is not about seeking any objective truth but about adapting oneself to meet market demands. Education, for example, is just a question of the ‘human capital’ (Foucault, 2008: 229) that persons should invest in themselves to be more employable or to gain an entrepreneurial advantage (Davies, 2019: 169).

In Hayekian thinking, the ‘slow forms of knowledge’ (Basevic, 2019: 5) and forms of hierarchical truth-telling are eschewed by the principle of the market as the primary ‘organizing principle’ (Davies, 2019: 166) of a society in which the role of expert could be drastically reduced. The mid-20th-century planner – epitomising rationalist socialist fantasies – should be replaced by that of the entrepreneur, for whom knowledge is a piece of useful information used to advance one's ends in a cut-throat market.

How then does the idea of the market as the ultimate information processor relate to democratic public communication or contemporary fake news and post-truth debates? The deregulated media sphere has, in many ways, developed the characteristics of a Hayekian institution. In Western media markets, deregulation has been the name of the game since 1980s, used to favour competition and dismantle state control over the media infrastructure (Hardy, 2014; Mansell, 2011). For instance, the position of public broadcasting has been weakened by breaking up telecommunication monopolies. Simultaneously, the internet is increasingly seen as a site for economic growth, innovation and data harvesting (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Freedman, 2018). The state-led regulatory regime of the mass media has been deregulated partly on the neoliberal premise that a competitive market system would promote the public interest as individuals signal ‘their wants and desires’ via a competitive marketplace (Barbrook, 1988).

Meanwhile, the position of journalism has weakened due to myriad changes in society. The need to strive for readership in a highly competitive leisure market has paved the way for a mainstream political journalism that emphasises entertainment (Baym, 2009). Since the 1970s, increasing commercial pressure has weakened the possibilities of US journalism to work as an institution of public good (McChesney, 2012). Market competition has made it more difficult for journalists to hold on to the ideal of journalistic autonomy – traditionally used to signify independence from political and economic interests and legitimise a liberal watchdog status (Carlson, 2017). In a competitive news market and amidst heightening political tensions, politicisation is becoming an increasingly lucrative business strategy (Nechushtai, 2018).

Davies (2019: 169) argues that the market works as a ‘post-truth institution’, processing and disseminating information and knowledge in real time and undercutting the established gatekeepers of a liberal public sphere. Social media performs just such a function. Importantly, social media platforms are not driven by any commitments to democracy or public interest, but by a constant desire to channel democratic and political passions into user-driven content production and addiction-like engagement (Dean, 2018; Seymour, 2019). The very function of social media is to eschew any idea of a consensus and to work as the real-time disseminator of impulses and emotions, undercutting established means of regulating the liberal public sphere. Thus, Mirowski (2019: 28), for example, argues that the phenomenon we have come to know as fake news stems from the (neo)liberal epistemic project, which has moved from ‘conventional curated news sources and towards news provided online by social media platforms dedicated to content aggregation and personalized communication’.

The ‘double movement’ in the regime of truth

The abovementioned transitions in the liberal regime of truth can be further illustrated with the help of another analyst of liberalism, Karl Polanyi, whose notion of the ‘double movement’ of capitalism is useful when analysing the in-built frictions within liberal capitalist societies. By double movement of capitalism, Polanyi ([1944] 2001: 248) means that capitalist societies are like a ‘pendulum’ constantly swinging between an attempt to extend market rationale to include new aspects of social life and an attempt to safeguard social life from the destabilising effects of the market.

Polanyi argues that the implementation of laissez-faire liberalism during the 19th century was gradually countered by a coalition of political forces (transgressing strictly economic class boundaries) that sought to stabilise social life in the face of increasing uncertainty. The market's liberal trust in the commodification of labour, land and money was gradually met with a process of decommodification in the form of, for example, labour laws that protected workers from the most brutal market effects. The Keynesian social–democratic welfare state emerged in the 20th century as a means of bringing such elements of social life as education and health care under democratic control. The effects of laissez-faire liberalism were countered by a movement that sought to curb the excesses of liberal capitalism to protect the viability of the capitalist system.

From a Polanyian perspective, professional journalism and national media policy emerged in the 20th century as a movement that sought to bring the media market under a certain amount of democratic and professional control. In Europe, public service broadcasting devoted itself to serving the needs of citizens and providing universal access to knowledge. The media market was regulated in the United States as well, with the aim of curbing the potentially distorting effects of the market mechanism and ensuring diverse public debate. Gradually, however, the Polanyian pendulum swung back. The social and economic crisis of the Keynesian welfare state during the 1970s (Hall et al., 1978) paved the way for a neoliberal backlash. With respect to regulation of the media market, the backlash can be seen in the well-documented assault on post-war media policy principles.

Conclusions

By building on Foucault, this article has illustrated how the post-truth and fake news phenomena are not mere deviations from liberal truth-telling principles, but instead signal a need to analyse the Polanyian double movement within the liberal ‘regime of truth’.

The article argued that the liberal regime of truth has, since the 18th century, been underpinned by the notion that the market is the site for determining the truth. However, to control the social risks that emerge from the use of individual market freedoms, liberal societies have developed various disciplinary techniques to ensure the security of liberal society (Foucault, 2008). With regard to the media, on the one hand, the liberal regime of truth has been oscillating between attempts to regulate the media market via such techniques as professional journalism and, on the other hand, free-market approaches that promote the market mechanism as the most effective way of disseminating knowledge. Such dynamics characterise the historical ‘double movement’ (Polanyi ([1944] 2001) of liberal capitalist societies, where protection-seeking forces have coalesced to curb the destabilising excesses of market liberalism.

The article has addressed this double movement with the help of two liberal thinkers, Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek. In his writings on democracy, the press and public opinion, Lippmann put forward a critique of the market-oriented popular press. According to Lippmann, the press nurtures prejudices and cognitive biases and fails to deliver the intelligent reporting demanded by a complex democratic society. Lippmann therefore demanded that journalists subscribe to standards of professionalism. Gradually, journalists during the first decades of the 20th century became self-regulating professionals who served as the gatekeepers of public discourse.

Hayek, on the other hand, articulated a critique of established expertise and planning. According to Hayek, experts do not have access to superior knowledge or the truth, as no number of experts can ever match the ability of the market mechanism to process information and knowledge. This article argued that since latter decades of the 20th century, the Hayekian approach regarding the regulation of knowledge has had the upper hand in the liberal regime of truth. This is illustrated by the decline of established techniques of popular truth-telling (such as journalism) and the increasing commodification of media infrastructures.

From these premises, this article has proposed new perspectives on the post-truth and fake news debate. By pointing out how the contemporary troubles affecting public communication are a result of liberalism's fundamental logics, the regime of truth perspective forces us to think of ways to discipline the liberal media market and to counter the Polanyian counter-movement that has dismantled ideals of public service. Indeed, instead of relying on ‘solutionist’ (Morozov, 2013) demands that seek to combat fake news and post-truth via incremental tweaks to social media algorithms, questions concerning the (de)commodification of media infrastructures need to be put to the fore.

Importantly, the point of the article has not been to idealise 20^th-century forms of media, such as professional journalism, or to harbour a baseless nostalgia for a by-gone era characterised by truth and reason (see Mejia et al., 2018). Rather, analysis of the double movement within the liberal regime of truth has highlighted some of the weaknesses in dominant post-truth and fake news narratives. By analysing the in-built frictions of liberal media systems, this article has contributed to existing critical scholarship that challenges the moral panics and technological determinism surrounding the somewhat ahistorical discourse on post-truth and fake news (Bratich, 2020; Farkas and Schou, 2019; Mejia et al., 2018). It has illustrated the historical roots of the debates regarding the regulation of knowledge in liberal democracies. The myriad calls from journalists and politicians to combat post-truth and fake news by reinstating truth into the heart of democracy echo arguments put forward already by Lippmann and Hayek. Some have argued, in the spirit of Lippmann, that the authority of such truth-telling institutions as journalism and science should be re-established to discipline irrational mass behaviour and curb fake news, while others, in a more Hayekian fashion, have argued that the competitive media market supports enlightened public debate (see Farkas and Schou, 2019: 91–95).

By bringing such historical continuities of liberal thought to the fore, this article has argued that the phenomena labelled ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ are not sudden epistemic shifts but instead illustrative of deep-rooted contradictions that should be addressed by analysing the material conditions underpinning liberal media systems and societies (see Mejia et al., 2018). The aim of the article has been to encourage media scholarship to address the thorny relationship between media infrastructures and democratic politics (Fenton, 2018) and analyse the ideological conflicts that shape the conditions of the public sphere.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Marko Ampuja and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and supportive comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Timo Harjuniemi

Notes

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Post-truth,fake news and the liberal ‘regime of truth’ – The double movement between Lippmann and Hayek

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Post-truth and fake news

The liberal ‘regime of truth’

Walter Lippmann, professional journalism and regulating the regime of truth

Friedrich Hayek and the liberal truth market

The ‘double movement’ in the regime of truth

Conclusions

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References