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On the dark side of truth

Book review written by Nina Trige Andersen
Where Truth Lies. Digital Culture and Documentary Media after 9/11
Forfatter: Kris Fallon
Forlag: University of California Press (USA)
MEDIA: The struggle for truth – and thus for documentarism – has become brutal. A new book analyzes how truth claims and digital culture shape our political realities.

(THIS ARTICLE IS ONLY MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

There is a very particular sense of fatigue associated with the claim that the media is to blame for the election of Donald Trump in 2016. It has been repeated so often that it is almost not worth considering what lies in it. It is worth noting, in turn, that the claim is rarely, if ever, made by people outside the media universe.

Those who make a living from producing, publishing and analyzing media and media content tend to markedly overestimate the power of the media and shamelessly overlook the (other) life experiences that shape people's political consciousness.

In that sense, Kris Fallon's new book Where Truth Lies. Digital Culture and Documentary Media after 9/11 into this tradition of decoupled understanding of how the world works and why.

Events that included revelations of secret prisons, torture, human rights abuses, more than one hundred thousand civilian casualties, two overseas wars.

“In 2016, when real estate speculator heir and reality TV character Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected president of the United States, it was the media's fault,” Fallon opens his narrative, and that phrase honestly brought me close to. . .

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Nina Trige Andersen
Trige Andersen is a freelance journalist and historian.

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