Publicity for Truth: Journalism Campaigns Against Misinformation and Fake News

In current debates about fake news and political strategies to fight them, we often witness a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts) and procedures of truth finding, and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. Populism feeds on this false dichotomy, to build up its support base by claiming that established procedures of truth finding through the intermediation of science and journalism are intrinsically biased and that ‘scientific facts’ and ‘alternative facts’ can claim the same validity in public debates. At the same time, concerted journalist efforts against misinformation and fake news also become part of this false dichotomy between mediated-biased and unmediated-pure perspectives on the truth. In their campaigns against misinformation, journalists do not only defend their professional role models as the ‘defenders of truth’ but bring themselves in as ‘watchdogs’ with the authority to detect irrationality in politics and to call for the correction of the malfunctions of democracy. Nevertheless, news-making still constitutes a political act that is informed by the priorities of the news organization agendas, the commercial and political influences on the news markets and the personal biases of the journalists. In this article, we take a closer look at this tension between the mediation and watchdog roles of journalists in the era of fake news and propose an analytical framework for understanding the truth orientation of journalism as part of democratic politics.