Today's post is by Shane Ryan at Singapore Management University, on his recent paper “ Fake News, Epistemic Coverage and Trust ” ( The Political Quarterly . 2021). Shane Ryan Is there any relationship between low levels of trust in mainstream media and belief in fake news? I argue that there is such a link. Before we get to why I think so, it’s important to clarify some of the important terms in the question. What is fake news? There is lots of disagreement about how to analyse the term and even some, such as Habgood-Coote, who suggest we shouldn’t try to analyse the term in the first place. Mindful of the difficult discussion, I don’t propose a full analysis of fake news but instead I propose that fake news requires that Information is presented as news that falls short of the (procedural) standards for news. What do I mean by trust? I argue trust requires that the trusting agent believes that the trusted agent has the competence to do whatever the trusting agent trusts the trus...
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