Editorial Introduction: Making and Faking the News

Abstract

It seems an appropriate testament to our troubled times that there has been a groundswell of academic work examining “Bullshit”, as both epistemic category and political and social phenomenon. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s much-cited musing “On Bullshit” (1986/2005) paved the way for so many psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, media studies scholars and, indeed, art and design practice researchers with the now familiar opening line: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit” (2005: 1). For Frankfurt, who first crafted this phrase in the mid 1980s, there was a need to interrogate bullshit on its own terms, for unlike straight up “liars” – whose deceptive outbursts at least hew to a belief that they are in possession of the facts (and an understanding that they are deliberately subverting them) – bullshitters possess no such belief in, or concern for, anything resembling the truth. An “indifference to how things really are” (29), an invention of both facts and contexts “to suit a purpose”, a complete unconcern as to whether its fabrications are found out – “bullshit”, argues Frankfurt, “is a greater enemy of truth than lies are” (52-58).