Monolithic Authenticity and Fake News Stephen Colbert’S Megalomania
Monolithic Authenticity and Fake News Stephen Colbert’s Megalomania SETH HULSE DESIRING AUTHENTICITY Authenticity is an idea that lurks behind every claim in every news story, as it is ascribed to medial narratives by sender, receiver, and the dissemination medium itself. Journalists caress authenticity by trying to enhance their stories with images and sounds from historical reality while news consumers try to inform themselves about their historical reality by confronting the claims made by journalists and deciding on what to believe. Although consumer confidence in news media, and television news in particular, has steadily fallen in recent decades, consumers still rely on broadcast television as their primary source of news information (cf. Rosenstiel 17-18). Also, despite having a low amount of trust in media institutions, as detailed in the expansive Pew Research Center report by Rosenstiel, American news consumers con- tinue to long for information that informs their conceptions of society. As Jan Berg persuasively writes in his essay »Techniken der medialen Authentifizierung,« our desire for authenticity can be understood as a longing for the all-powerful, for the wondrous, the holy, and the au- thorless object (cf. 56, 65). He describes the modes and the depiction techniques of authenticity and posits that authenticity need not only be seen as a relic of undisputable omnipotence, magnificence, and holi- ness, but that instead one can also understand it as »a specifically modern modus of truth, a mode of compensation, which in the modern world shifts into those positions that have become empty as a result of 64 | SETH HULSE Enlightenment and de-deification« (Berg 56; my translation).1 Most interestingly, Berg highlights an important facet of the authentication process, namely that of self-ascription, of supposed authorlessness.
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