Truth Claims Across Media

This book offers an interdisciplinary and transmedial approach to truthful communication in different media types. Bringing together a wide range of media types and interactions from a transmedial perspective, the volume maps out how truth claims are made in different contexts, and how different media promise to create a truthful perception of the social world. In contemporary societies, different truth claims collide, and old certainties are questioned. New possibilities to combine media and transfer information between different media types have not only revolutionized our ways of learning, working, and socializing, but have also had a significant impact on our perception of truth and truthfulness of communication. Digital technology, such as bot accounts or deep fake videos amplify the spreading of disinformation, in step with social crises such as political polarization, climate change and a pandemic, drawing attention to how reliable communication is destabilized and questioned. In this unstable climate, binaries such as true/false, authentic/fake and fiction/facts are difficult to apply. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate how media products contribute to the perception of the truthfulness of what they communicate. The volume brings together various media types and contexts such as factional narration in journalism and literature, press conferences, documentaries and mockumentaries, images in magazines and on social media, horror movies, biopics, and educational games and explores how truth claims, authenticity discourses, and knowledge communication are established and how they collide, merge, or are confused.

This is an open access book.