ABSTRACT
Contemporary media represent a particularly fertile ground for conspiracy theories (Craft et al. 2017). While in the past it was difficult to disseminate alternative views of important events (Olmsted 2009), things have radically changed in today’s communication environments, where advances in technology have made it relatively easy for people to disseminate a variety of narratives and points of view. This has resulted in a noticeable increase in media messages promoting conspiracy theories, with consequences on the public’s belief in such theories (cf. Mulligan, Habel 2012; Swami et al. 2013; Jolley, Douglas 2014a, 2014b; Einstein, Glick 2015). Official news and information are now more frequently put side by side with alternative versions, including unverified data and fake news. In fact, according to German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the separation between fact and fiction is often abandoned altogether:
News and reports and even editorial opinion are dressed up with all the accoutrements of entertainment literature.… What in this way only intimates itself in the daily press has progressed further in the newer media.… Under the common denominator of so-called human interest emerges the mixtum compositum of a pleasant and at the same time convenient subject for entertainment that, instead of doing justice to reality, has a tendency to present a substitute more palatable for consumption and more likely to give rise to an impersonal indulgence in stimulating relaxation than to a public use of reason.… With the arrival of the new media the form of communication as such has changed; they have had an impact, more penetrating (in the strict sense of the word) than was ever possible for the press.
(1991: 170)