DOI: 10.5176/2301-3710_JMComm14.31
Authors: Mireille Carrère
Abstract:
Charges that mass information has become undependable are increasingly frequent, allegedly because of increasingly uniform sources, inadequate fact checking, and a composite of insubstantial “news” items that form a kind of uncontrollable stream of information. This trend is intrinsically linked to the evolution of the system itself and to the logic that underlies it, against the backdrop of an idealized notion of transparency and omnipresent communication that is an element of our post-modern era. Still, this system, which vaunts itself as the vector of truth, only provides some of the time--and paradoxically--what I have elsewhere labeled shams or mock-ups of the truth.
This article proposes to examine a corollary to this argument that focuses on the production of biased information via the twin mirages of veracity and verisimilitude, which offer a superficial appearance of truth.
How can the media continue to claim that they objectively describe the reality of events and “tell the truth”? This decoding of the truth is in fact fueled by pseudo-objectivity and the illusion of independence thought: “fabrication” and ideologization are incapable of revealing the real.
Keywords: Mass information and its shams, Illusions of Media Information, Veracity and Verisimilitude, "Fabrication" and ideologization
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