The Guardian, Donald Trump and Fake News- Part 1: The Relevance of Bourdieu
Fake News is a term that has become ubiquitous in the media. Its symbolic significance is as great as its meaning is obscure. The symbolic significance is related to the importance that people attach to differentiating the truth and reality from lies and distortions.
The complexities associated with the use of the term has parallels with those raised by attempts to understand the term “populism”.
In 1992 French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu published an interview which is highly relevant to the understanding of populism and fake news today.
In this post I set out Bourdieu’s views and explain how they help us to understand the phenomenon of populism. I will analyse the relation of this to the ubiquity of the term fake news in the traditional media in a subsequent post.