“Maybe News”: On the Skeptic Posture of Untrusting Readers

Although the literature on news and fake news has covered a vast array of questions regarding the epistemic attitudes of readers, in this paper I wish to focus on the quite vast epistemic phenomenon of a largely skeptical posture towards news that strictly depends of institutional trust erosion. Such posture is meta-evaluative in kind and renders the approach of the reader peculiarly sceptic as to whether the informational content deserves to be taken as a genuine news at all. While such attitude may evolve and later lead to an epistemically mistaken, or in any case disputable, understanding of all news as fake, its primary feature is that those who cultivate it take contents published in newspaper or online channels as candidates for just being “maybe news”. Even if the category of “maybe news” is not ontological, I take the label to best capture the posture of these readers, by exploiting what Cappelen defines a “lexical effect” (2018). As any lexical effect, the “maybe news” label aims to draw attention on the peculiar subjective epistemic filter that is applied by these readers when exposed to news. By taking informational contents as at best mere candidates for being news, regardless of their source and credentials, the attitude in question is significantly different from being outright contrarian to official information channels so that one is sure that the news is false. I’ll conclude by explaining how such a skeptic posture can only be defused in so far as we can reform its governing higher-order skeptical beliefs regarding information in general.