The Mythology of Truth

When journalists speak of truth, they often confuse their professional method with access to reality. This confusion, far from being anecdotal, reveals a fundamental anthropological mechanism that deserves to be explored.

The Confusion Between Method and Objective

Ethnology has taught us, since the foundational works of Bronisław Malinowski, that observing a culture from the inside in no way guarantees an understanding of its objective truth. The observer’s gaze is always situated, dependent on their presuppositions, training, and interests. This lesson, which the entire anthropological tradition has confirmed since Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), seems to have been forgotten by a profession that claims to access reality in a transparent manner.

Journalists, when defending their craft against critics, invariably invoke the search for truth as the ultimate justification for their activity. This defense, while seemingly legitimate, actually masks a fundamental confusion between two distinct orders. The first concerns the objective pursued: to produce information that enlightens citizens about the world. The second pertains to the methods employed to reach this objective—that is, professional practices specific to journalism, such as cross-referencing sources, fact-checking, or field investigations.

However, as the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) shows, every profession tends to institutionalize its practices to the point of confusing them with the reality they claim to serve. The authors describe how “institutional objectivation” transforms social conventions into natural self-evidences. Journalists are no exception. Their working methods, historically constituted and socially situated, come to appear as the only possible path toward true information.

Pierre Bourdieu identified this mechanism in On Television (1996) by showing how “journalists have special glasses through which they see certain things and not others, and see in a certain way the things they do see.” This selection, this construction of the gaze, is not perceived as such by those who exercise it. On the contrary, it appears as professional evidence, a necessity of the trade, or even a cardinal virtue.

Information as an Order-Word

Gilles Deleuze, in his 1987 lecture “What is the Creative Act?”, proposed a radical analysis of the nature of media information. For the philosopher, “information is the controlled system of the order-words that are current in a given society.” This formula warrants a pause. Information, far from being a simple neutral vehicle for content, constitutes an injunction in itself. It does not invite us to reflect; it dictates what it is appropriate to think.

This conception aligns with Marshall McLuhan’s analyses in Understanding Media (1964), according to which “the medium is the message.” The very form of media transmission conditions the content it carries. A fact reported live on television is not the same fact that will be analyzed in a history book ten years later. The technical and social apparatus of communication shapes what is communicated, far beyond the mere apparent content.

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), pushed this analysis to its ultimate consequences by showing how “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Contemporary journalism participates in this spectacle insofar as it transforms the relationship with reality into a relationship with media representations of reality. Citizens no longer know the world except through the mediation of the stagings offered by the media.

Jacques Ellul, in Propaganda (1962), distinguished between the “agitation propaganda” of authoritarian regimes and the “integration propaganda” of democracies. The latter, more subtle, aims to “give citizens the feeling that they have wanted the acts of the government.” Journalism, even when it seeks to be critical of power, often participates in this integration propaganda by defining the frameworks of the thinkable, the limits of acceptable debate, legitimate questions, and those that fall under “conspiracy theory.”

The Corporatist Defense of a Situated Gaze

There exists among journalists a form of professional mythology, comparable to what Claude Lévi-Strauss described in his analyses of traditional societies. This mythology makes the journalist a cultural hero, a mediator between the chaos of events and the order of meaning, a guardian of truth in the face of the forces of disinformation. Like any myth, this one fulfills an essential social function: it legitimizes the existence of the profession, justifies its privileges, and founds its authority.

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, in Manufacturing Consent (1988), rigorously demonstrated how the economic and political structures of the media condition the production of information. Their “propaganda model” identifies five filters that shape media content: the concentration of ownership, dependence on advertising, privileged information sources, “flak” (pressures and threats), and dominant ideology. These filters are not the result of a conscious conspiracy, but of a systemic logic that naturally orients information production in the direction of dominant interests.

David Colon, in Propaganda: Mass Manipulation in the Contemporary World (2019), extends this analysis by showing how manipulation techniques have become sophisticated in the digital age. Information is at the service of a power that considers itself legitimate and which, consequently, allows itself arrangements with what it claims to be the truth. Journalists, consciously or not, participate in this system when they agree to relay certain information rather than other pieces, and when they grant credit to certain sources over others.

Laurent Mucchielli, in Defending Democracy: An Engaged Sociology (2023), documented with precision how, during the Covid-19 health crisis, “most journalists were not capable of distancing themselves from politico-industrial propaganda.” This inability was not the result of individual ill will, but of a systemic functioning where logics of economic dependence, social conformism, and belief in the legitimacy of authorities combined to produce information aligned with the government discourse.

Fact-Checking or the Apotheosis of the Objectivist Illusion

Fact-checking represents the paradoxical culmination of this claim to objectivity. This practice, presented as the ultimate bulwark against disinformation, rests on a philosophically naive presupposition: that it would be possible to distinguish between true and false without ambiguity, and that certain professionals possess the necessary skills to perform this sorting. However, as Friedrich Nietzsche reminded us, “there are no facts, only interpretations.”

This position, far from leading to a nihilistic relativism, invites us instead to recognize the constructed dimension of all knowledge. Fact-checking claims to cross-reference sources, but for any given piece of information, the available sources are infinite. The choice of some over others invariably reflects presuppositions, often unconscious, that guide the construction of the narrative. As Roland Barthes explained in Mythologies (1957), this apparent neutrality constitutes precisely the most effective mask of ideology.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, formalized by Michael Crichton in 2002, perfectly illustrates this mechanism. We have all had this revealing experience: when an article deals with a field we have mastered, we are often appalled by the simplifications, approximations, or even total misconceptions it contains. Yet, immediately afterward, we read another article on a field less familiar to us, granting total confidence to the content, forgetting our previous experience.

What is true of articles is equally true of fact-checking. The simple fact of choosing what deserves to be verified, which sources are considered legitimate, and the way the verdict is formulated—all of these constitute choices oriented by a particular worldview. Fact-checking thus manufactures what Jean Baudrillard would call a “simulacrum” of truth, a hyperreality that substitutes itself for the reality it claims to describe.

Consensual Truth: A Philosophical Proposition

In light of these observations, what conception of truth can we propose that does justice to the complexity of reality without sinking into relativism? Jürgen Habermas’s work on communicative rationality offers a fruitful path. In his Theory of Communicative Action (1981), the German philosopher develops the idea that truth emerges from an intersubjective process of discussion and argumentation. It is not an isolated individual, be they a journalist or a scientist, who holds access to the true, but the community of rational beings engaged in authentic dialogue.

What I call here “consensual truth” designates precisely this process by which a claim about the world acquires the status of a recognized fact. A fact is not what exists objectively, independent of any human gaze, for such an entity is forever inaccessible to us. A fact is what achieves consensus within a given community at a given time. This consensus can evolve, widen or narrow, and be challenged by new perspectives. The history of science, as analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), perfectly illustrates this dynamic.

This conception of truth as consensus in no way implies that “anything goes.” On the contrary, it calls for increased rigor in the conditions under which consensus is produced. For a consensus to be legitimate, it must emerge from a process where all voices can be heard, where arguments are weighed rationally, and where particular interests are identified and set aside. Yet, precisely, the current conditions of media production of information are very far from this ideal.

Journalists, by presenting themselves as the guardians of truth, substitute themselves for this democratic process of consensus-building. They claim to speak the truth where they are merely proposing one point of view among others. Their gaze is situated, like all human gazes. Their information is constructed, like all information. Their sources are chosen, as all sources always are. To recognize this reality is not to disqualify journalism; it is, on the contrary, to give it its rightful place: that of a contributor among others to public debate, and not an overarching arbiter.

Toward an Education in Authentic Critical Thinking

True critical thinking does not consist of identifying “good” sources and disqualifying “bad” ones. Nor does it consist of delegating one’s judgment to self-proclaimed fact-checkers. It resides in the permanent awareness that all information is a situated construction, oriented by interests, presuppositions, and frameworks of thought. This awareness does not lead to generalized skepticism, but to an increased attention to the conditions of discourse production.

The questions every citizen should ask when faced with information are those that the ethnographic tradition asks of any discourse: Who is speaking? From where does this person derive their legitimacy? What interests might they be serving? How is the information constructed? What alternatives have been discarded? This method, inspired by Michel Foucault—who reminded us that “discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle”—applies to all discourses without exception.

Hannah Arendt warned us that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false, no longer exist.” This essential distinction cannot be learned through submission to verification authorities. It is acquired through the patient and rigorous exercise of critical judgment, through confrontation with a plurality of viewpoints, and through the recognition of the constructed dimension of all knowledge.

Media literacy, if it is to deserve the name, should begin with this recognition: we are all, journalists included, producers of partial and situated representations. The question is not who holds the truth, but how we can, together, build a plurality of perspectives that enriches our understanding of the world. This perspective, which aligns with the tradition of cultural rights and cultural democracy, remains largely absent from institutional frameworks. It is time to introduce it.

Embracing Subjectivity to Better Serve the Common Good

The critique I formulate here is not intended to discredit journalists or deny the utility of their work. There are among them honest people and dishonest people, rigorous investigations and botched productions. My point aims rather to deconstruct the mythology of objectivity that surrounds this profession and which, paradoxically, harms its credibility as much as its mission.

A journalism that fully embraces its subjectivity, that recognizes its gaze as situated, its sources as chosen, and its narrative as constructed, would ultimately perform a better service for the public. It would invite reflection rather than submission. It would present itself as one voice among others in the democratic concert rather than as the tribunal of information. It would trust in the critical intelligence of citizens rather than misleadingly doing their thinking for them.

For ultimately, what threatens democracy is not so much the circulation of divergent opinions as the claim of a single discourse to embody the ultimate truth. It is this claim that manufactures symbolic violence, that excludes from the debate those whose analyses do not fit the pre-established framework, and that transforms legitimate disagreement into pathological deviance. The consensual truth I call for does not emerge from the monopoly of an authorized word, but from authentic dialogue between perspectives accepted as partial and complementary.

Immanuel Kant invited us to dare to think for ourselves, “Sapere aude.” This requirement, which founds the Enlightenment, remains more relevant than ever in the age of industrialized information. It is satisfied neither by the prefabricated certainties of fact-checking nor by the illusions of journalistic objectivity. It calls on every citizen to exercise their judgment, to recognize the complexity of reality, and to accept the discomfort of uncertainty. It is at this price, and only at this price, that we can together build a shared understanding of the world that deserves the name of truth.