Fact Resistance, Populism, and Conspiracy Theories

Vincent F. Hendricks and Mads Vestergaard
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Vincent F. Hendricks: University of Copenhagen
Mads Vestergaard: University of Copenhagen

Chapter Chapter 5 in Reality Lost, 2019, pp 79-101 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In 2005, the concept truthiness was coined by Stephen Colbert, host of the popular satire show, The Colbert Report. Truthiness has been referred to as truth that comes from guts and not from facts and is defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” The concept took hold. In 2006 it was declared word of the year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It was used particularly and critically in reference to the political scene of the conservative right in the USA at that time. Before Breitbart, the conservative right rallied around Fox News, whose biased news coverage was satirized by The Colbert Report. The show’s critical satire focused on how, especially in the conservative right wing and for then President Bush, it often was enough that something felt like it was true in order to be accepted as such. And not only in the conservative right wing may gut feeling replace truth; this is a universal human phenomenon. The phenomenon of truthiness may find support in cognitive psychology. Through experiments cognitive psychology has demonstrated just how much political bias matters when selecting information and accepting it as true or rejecting it as false.

Keywords: Conspiracy Theories; Truthiness; Biased News Coverage; Universal Human Phenomenon; Colbert Report (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-00813-0_5

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-00813-0_5

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