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| image from alexsarchives.org |
SENATOR, the far right doesn’t mind that its communications people engaged in the peddling of fake news find themselves, along with the far-right parties hosting them, placed in a bad light. After all, the far right’s fake-news programming is not interested in hijacking the image of virtuous truthfulness traditionally claimed by journalism, the reason why it often resorts to “kidding”/“joking” (its darling technique for confusing the issues) or otherwise violent anger. The mission of the far right’s post-truth politics is to render all information suspect or personal, especially information coming from the institution of journalism that it habitually counter-accuses, naturally, of being the fake one every time the latter shouts “fake” toward an item coming from the populist right. In the final attainment of a culture of cynicism in society, where all claims at having reached the truth would have naturally been weakened (almost as if to parody left-leaning post-structuralism), it is true that the far right’s own truth-peddling would suffer, too. . . . But so will journalism’s ability to convince! That journalistic impotence is the sole or final target of the far right’s program of popularizing the political virtue of the sneering and laughing lie. For when that culture is reached, where information from all quarters (including its own) becomes trash, all the far right’s secrets become freed from the impact of any kind of journalistic scrutiny, all journalism in its old sense having now been rendered feeble, and all rightist propaganda that have replaced journalism made newly sacrosanct. [S / -I]
