Book review of Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (second edition), by Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, Routledge, 2024, 219 pages

Abstract

In the past decade, public discourses on post-truth have become ubiquitous across the global public sphere, rapidly normalized as a convenient explanation for declining trust, the rise of populism, and the erosion of democratic institutions (Ferretti, 2023; Flood, 2016; Harjuniemi, 2022; McIntyre, 2018). In Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy (second edition), Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou intervene critically in this narrative by challenging the common place assumption that the contemporary crisis of democracy stems primarily from the erosion of truth, and by reframing post-truth discourse as a politically charged imaginary that narrows democratic possibility rather than expanding it. The volume does not set out to explain the persistence of fake news as a technical or moral problem; instead, it examines the politics of post-truth discourse and its structural effects. The book challenges the assumption, often presented as axiomatic, that democracy is synonymous with truth, and that returning to a stable factual order would automatically resolve contemporary democratic crises.