The elective affinity between post-truth communication and populist politics

ABSTRACT

Here I propose an ‘elective affinity’ between populism and post-truth communication. Trends in public communication, specifically the breakdown of the twentieth century mass media order and the consolidation of disaggregated mediated spheres, lay the ground for populist politics. The upsurge of populist politics is symptomatic of the consolidation of post-truth communication as a distinctive feature of contemporary politics. The kind of post-truth politics represented by populism thrives in the current conditions of public communication. Populism’s Manichean politics stands in opposition to the possibility of truth-telling as a collective effort to produce agreed-upon facts and reach consensus on the correspondence between assertions and reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-truth
• populism
• public communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The author acknowledges the financial support of the Australia and New Zealand Communication Association and the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in attending ANZCA 2017.

Notes on contributors

Silvio Waisbord

Silvio Waisbord is Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication and former Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. His recent books include News of Baltimore: Race, Rage and the City (edited with Linda Steiner, Routledge, 2017), Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights (edited with Howard Tumber, Routledge, 2017), and Media Movements: Civil Society and Media Policy Reform in Latin America (with Soledad Segura, Zed, 2016).