The paper aims to examine post-truth, considering its theoretical aspects and following the communication grounds for its appearance. The paper suggests that the Post-truth Era is a result of algorithmically managed social interactions and the automation of communication. The Internet of Things, the ubiquitous media presence and the algorithmic power transform „The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Walter Benjamin) into „a Posttruth Era”. In the digital world of the 21st century – a world completely fragmented into data and market segments, the media technologies not only reproduce and re-create reality, but also take the next step and create an entirely new reality. Based on the critical survey of various articles and theoretical approaches the paper identifies the problematic areas that could engender a future discussion, and draw attention to post-truth as a problem and its relevance to the modern world.
Post-truth and emotional branding are constantly criticized, the main argument being the creation of emotional pressure in the decision-making process. This is also cited as a prerequisite for fake news, rumours, political lies etc. Can we get out of this frame and look for new intersections of post-truth and emotional branding? Perhaps this would be a way of humanizing post-truth for the benefit of society and reducing brand populism.
The development of the Internet and social media and networks as a media environment and communication channels combined with the specificity of the journalistic profession in the online environment are a factor which contributes to the emergence and proliferation of fake news. The lack of reliable fact checking by the media and the fast news consumption by the public lead to mass disinformation about certain issues or subjects. The current paper examines fake news from several points of view and describes the models of their use – as harmless jokes, as lack of journalistic competence or professionalism and as means of manipulation and intentional misleading of public opinion. The attempts of big media corporations to fight fake news are also described.
The paper examines the impact of fake news on the relationship between companies and their strategic audiences. The text is structured into two parts. The focus in the first part is on the structure of corporate communications and the model of successful corporate policy presented as a projection of the idea of the business of trust. The second part highlights the main aspects of the development of the cosmetic giant „L’Oreal”, which has preserved its image as a strong brand and an ethical company in the conditions of hypercompetitiveness and fake news. The study is based on Van Rieland Fombrun’s theory of corporate communications as a polyfunctional concept and on Kotler’s idea of market-oriented strategic planning, providing an advantage to firms in situations of risk and dynamic social transformations.
The nonobjective journalistic interpretation of economic facts can lead to both minor and serious consequences, ranging from the individual recipient to a whole business sector. Therefore, the fundamental principle of providing reliable information to society is of particular importance for the economic field. The paper addresses the issue of unintentional distribution of fake news in the context of economic journalism and new media. The combination of political, social, economic and technological factors has contributed to the growth and scale of the problem, with the most important one being the impact of the internet environment, which has turned fake news into an unwanted function or rather a dysfunction of digital media.
The paper discusses the possibilities of countering fake news in Bulgarian media with the instruments of media law, regulation, self-regulation and co-regulation. The study has reached the following important conclusions: 1. The laws are inadequate to the new challenge. There are temptations to fight it through the Criminal Code or a special law that can turn the prosecution service into a repressive media supervisor. 2. The State can contribute to curbing disinformation in the media by highlighting their ownership and funding. 3. The ethical codes oblige journalists to be responsible to society, but self-regulation is de-legitimized by the division in the guild. The solution lies in the development of co-regulation: the state stimulates the media by setting a condition for advertising in them: that they should agree on one code and that their ethics committee should be able to penalize them financially for fake news.
Careful and thorough fact-checking is a main tool for counteracting fake news, alternative facts and the context created in the Post-Truth Era. This paper examines the contemporary fact-checking mechanisms in the Bulgarian media environment. The methods applied are data analysis, interviews with proffessional journalists, a survey among media content users, and a case study. The research ws cnducted within the framework of the DCOST Project 01/10 – 04.07.2017 (project leader Prof. Lilia Raycheva), supported by the National Scientific Fund of Bulgaria, and developed within the Europpean Commission‘s Action IS 1404: Evolution of Reading in the Age of Digitization (E-READ).
In connection with the frequent breach of P. Grice’s maxim about truth, the paper seeks answers to the questions of whether Bulgarians recognize the unreliable information in the media and what is the role of linguistic means in the process of interpreting the truth of the messages. The paper also comments on the results of an experiment aimed at verifying the role of three groups of language tools in forming a sense of reliability or unreliability of journalistic information among recipients.
The paper analyses the manipulative potential of one insufficiently-explored sentence part in Bulgarian syntax – the appositive, and also the appositive phrases, which are composed of a complement (object or subject complement) and the noun it describes. The paper also stresses the appositive word groups (constructions) that follow the ‘common noun+common noun’ model. The fact that word order in this type of appositive word groups has a role in changing the intention of communication and in creating – deliberately or not – fake news in media discourse is well supported and richly illustrated.
The paper outlines some of the challenges that PR experts are facing in their work in the so-called „Fake News Era”, dominated by misinformation and the need for verifying the facts published in social and traditional media. The main thesis of Gьnter Bentele’s theory of public trust is used to frame the basic idea about the lack of trust in the media in general. Some of his conclusions drawn in the 1990s, are similar to the results summarized today by two reports: Cision’s „State of the Media Report” (2017) and Edelman’s „Trust Barometer” (2017). The paper also presents a few case studies, related to the distribution of fake news that damage the prestige and the reputation of the affected companies (Pepsi Co, New Balance, Ferrero Croup). It poses the question about the extent to which we can talk about corporate communication management and strategies in the post-truth era and whether it would be more appropriate to include a Rumor Management strategy in the corporate communication strategy arsenal when a corporation needs to react to a piece of fake news in the post-truth era.
The paper presents the theoretical and research aspects of media interrelations among the phenomena of post-truth, fake news, populist statements, and the use of alternative facts in political communication. It conducts a comparative analysis of these concepts and analyzes illustrative examples from the media environment in which the terms operate in the same information discourse. The main focus is on two key academic empirical studies whose theoretical and empirical scholarly approaches point to the main thesis of this paper – that post-truth and fake news create an emotional context of information perception and that this is the basis on which consumers and voters shape their behavior, reactions, understandings and views.
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