Taking conspiracy culture seriously: Journalism needs to face its epistemological trouble

Abstract

The taxi driver who took me from Prague airport to the 68th International communication association conference was interested in the hottest topics in media and journalism scholarship. ‘Do you know what’s the biggest problem of mainstream media?’ he asked. ‘Fake news’. My reply was cautious: ‘Sure, what about that?’ Very calmly, the taxi driver proceeded to explain how the media were lying, lying about 9/11 (it’s an inside job), lying about immigration being good (it’s bad), lying about everything so that citizens had no other choice than looking for real information on the Internet. There was even an attempt at explaining a pun in Czech about public service media being the biggest liar of it all; unfortunately, it was lost in translation. ‘But why do you think the media must lie? What’s their interest?’ I asked. ‘Now that’s the right question, young lady, who’s behind the curtain? I don’t know. Powerful people. Rich people. Is it the Jews? Maybe’. I gave up and steered the conversation in other directions, and it turns out the taxi driver was very knowledgeable about Czech cuisine and cubist architecture. Conspiracy is one of the most pervasive and prominent worldviews of our time. The belief that there is some hidden reality behind mere appearances, that everything is somehow connected, and that powerful forces are at play is not reserved to some irrational, marginal fringe of our society. Conspiratorial thinking is out there, in the mainstream: surveys indicate that over half of the American population consistently endorses some kind of conspiratorial narrative about a current political event, a trait that is remarkably widespread and stable across the usual ideological and sociological divides (Oliver and Wood, 2014). Even if the most outrageous and anti-modern flavors of ‘conspiracism’ thrive on social media platforms – flat earthers on Youtube are only one example among many (Burdick, 2018) – the phenomenon is, of course, neither new nor specific to some dark