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

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 corners of the Internet. Rather than seeing conspiratorial thinking as an individual flaw belonging to the realm of mental health, scholars have argued that it collectively emerged at the crossroads of historical, cultural, economic, political, and sociological transformations over more than a century. Since the late 19th century, clues of its cultural stronghold can be found in the unrelenting success of detective and crime novels, developments in psychiatry that have given us the vocabulary of paranoia, as well as efforts from the social sciences to reveal invisible structures (Boltanski, 2012). Other important intellectual developments of the last decades – among others, cybernetics and the concept of system, theories of complexity, and the pervasiveness of ‘network’ as an all-encompassing metaphor – all nicely fit with the underlying idea that everything is connected and that there is something more to it than what we can see. A ‘response to existential insecurity in a disenchanted world’ (Aupers, 2012: 30), conspiracy culture is yet another symptom of modernity.

This becomes a problem for journalism when the conspiratorial narrative, which is always Manichean (Oliver and Wood), naturally puts ‘the media’ with the villains, along with all the other institutions that are in charge of arranging the messiness of the world in a stable, agreed-upon ‘reality’ (Boltanski, 2012). Coupled with overall low levels of trust in the news media (Fletcher and Nielsen, 2017) and overwhelming anti-intellectualism (McDevitt et al., 2018), it puts journalism in an impossible situation. How can journalism inform the public about the world when the public’s first reflex is to read news media as agents of hidden powers that (willingly or unwillingly, it does not matter) obfuscate the world?

But that is a very reductive view of the problem, one that opposes well-meaning, truth-seeking journalism, on one hand, to a suspicious, wary, and delusional public, on the other hand. Instead, let us look at that problem from another angle: good journalism is not that different from conspiracy theories. It is so difficult for journalists to distinguish themselves from your average tinfoil-hat Youtuber, as they seem to care about the exact same things: the accumulation of facts and evidence, patient investigation, systematic doubt, following clues, and speaking truth to the powerful. Investigative journalism, in particular, could be said to take part in conspiracy culture – in a tradition that, from muckrakers to the Panama papers, has unveiled many real coordinated attempts from the well-connected, powerful elites to lie, obfuscate, and sometimes indeed conspire.

Conspiracism, after all, could be understood as the ultimate form of journalistic exposé – it is what happens when you take the rhetoric objectivity, facts, documentary evidence, and systematic doubt and push that logic to the extreme. But there is a crucial epistemological distinction that is obvious and at the same time very difficult to pinpoint: a conspiracy theory, unlike a piece of investigative journalism, is simply not true, that is, it does not say anything about the world.

By bringing journalism and conspiracy culture closer together, I do not aim at promoting crazy theories while dismissing serious news work, or give up to a hyperreal, postmodern conclusion that everything is absurd anyway. Instead, I believe that taking conspiracy culture seriously could force journalism to question its own epistemology and reaffirm it in terms that may try to escape the impasse of modernity (Latour, 1993, 2004). To put it very briefly, a fascination for professional values such as objectivity – understood as the separation between facts and values – has put journalism in an epistemological deadlock (see, for example, Ettema and Glasser, 1998; Martine and De Maeyer, 2018). It finds itself overwhelmed, on one hand, by conspiratorial epistemologies that subvert the rhetoric of objectivity and fact-based discourses and, on the other hand, by deconstructionist epistemologies that simply dismiss the possibility of saying something about an objective world.

If journalists want to escape that deadlock, they need to ask difficult questions: how can they truthfully account for the world? What is a journalistic fact? What is a truth claim and how can they sustain it? How are facts assembled? Can we even reconcile the idea that journalistic facts are indeed assembled but that they still tell us something real (so they are not constructed, as in artificially created)? Those are tough epistemological questions that journalists and journalism scholars cannot answer by relying on taken-for-granted, one-size-fits-all answers such as the ritual reliance on ‘objectivity’.

In other words, to face this challenge, journalism could try to remember that at the core of its activity lies a simple yet formidable ambition: telling the public about the world. Different forms of journalism have different ways of creating and maintaining that connection with the world, with facts, with reality. Taking conspiracy culture seriously, instead of dismissing it as irrational or invalid, may serve as a reminder that a realist epistemology is hard work.