Sociology

Liberalism

Politics

Algorithm

Epistemology

Journalism

Philosophy

Political economy

Political science

Classical liberalism

Law and economics

Disinformation

Scholarship

Public sphere

Computer science

Social media

Democracy

Media studies

State (computer science)

European Journal of Communication

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.

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