1.1 Facts, Fakes, and Truths: A Media-Oriented Approach

Whether you look at the entertainment industry, social media, artistic realms, or the political and civil spheres, truth claims, authenticity discourses, and knowledge communication are high on the agenda everywhere. Social media influencers strive for creating an authentic persona, and TV series promise to show the audience the truth about a crime that actually happened. The crucial role of testimonies and witnessing for social justice has been made more than clear with social movements like #MeToo and political protests all over the world. Emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic and the ecological crisis are global reminders that we do not have time to waste on misinformation; we need to get things right.

Adding to the complexity, there appears to be a communication paradox. The loss of influence of former gatekeepers and experts in the digital public sphere has led to a more multivoiced but also a more fragmented and polarized public debate. Digital social networks provide new and valuable ways to share opinions and information, but they also offer infrastructure for spreading false information. Digital technology allows for flexible integrations of words, images, and sounds, which can challenge perceived notions of authentic human presence in the form of deep fakes or chatbots. The internet has democratized access to information and publication but has also led to communication practices that threaten democratic processes.

The current disagreement on facts, fakes, and truths as well as the tensions between authority and authenticity, empirical and personal experience are complex problems with disruptive social consequences that are not easily addressed. The emergence of terms such as “post-truth” and “fake news” is a symptom of such complexity. “Post-truth,” according to the Oxford Dictionaries (2016), refers to situations “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This does not mean that a society could be “past” truth, but, rather, it signifies how certain actors increasingly treat truth as irrelevant (McIntyre, 2018). “Fake news,” another current term of relevance to our topic, is used as a shorthand to describe the various forms of false information spread for strategic reasons (Tandoc, 2019), but, it is also a term that is used rhetorically to attack opponents and to discredit facts that contradict specific ideologies and beliefs. Even if you want to describe the current “information disorder” more objectively, with the many different kinds of mis- and disinformation that “pollute” the information sphere (Wardle & Derekshan, 2017), this still leaves us with an underlying problem: What can be defined as mis- or disinformation is consumed as “information” and relevant “news” by certain audiences.

While truth still matters, there is disagreement on which sources qualify as truthful and how this can be established. As a result, a general agreement about facts, truth, and trust appears to be lost and needs to be renegotiated, as different forms of truth claims collide. Authorities and experts are challenged by alternative voices (Holt, 2020). There are different ways to establish facts and reach conclusions. You can rely on empirical facts, but you can also use evidence from personal testimonies and rely on what you perceive as authentic behavior. The hierarchy between these methods and which method trumps the other is currently under debate.

Disagreements over truth claims are not limited to today’s world, but perhaps they have never been as visible and so dominant. The diversity of the mediascape is a significant factor behind this, and following Michael Lynch (2016), we find that the new digital possibilities to communicate also greatly affect how we gain and construct knowledge. The contradictory social and communicational challenges, new potentials, and disruptive effects can be connected to how digital technology has transformed the way we communicate, work, and socialize. In other words, the emergence of new media foregrounds the role of media in the construction of knowledge.

Emphasizing the importance of media for knowledge communication, this volume suggests that we need a media-oriented approach to understand truth claims and truthfulness in communication. Most of our knowledge about the world is mediated by sources we regard as reliable such as friends or experts. We also gain knowledge from media products such as textbooks, news media, encyclopedias, documentaries, scientific articles, and testimonials, as well as novels, movies, poems, and games. The kind of knowledge we expect and gain is different depending on whether we read a novel or a scientific report, whether we watch a movie or the news, share information among friends, or act as an expert. All communication is dependent on material objects or perceivable phenomena. The choice of objects and their affordances define what we can communicate and how. Yet the way the material and medial specificities form the information they convey goes very often unnoticed. The point is that as long as media are functioning and familiar, we treat them as transparent and focus mostly on the “content” they mediate. We tend to notice the media involved when they are broken or self-reflectively draw attention to themselves, or when we have to learn how to use them, in the case of new and unfamiliar media. So while digital technology enables us to combine and switch between different modes and media types in hitherto unprecedented scale, the underlying transformation processes that take place when different texts, images and sounds integrate or when individual media products such as texts, videos, memes are shared across platforms are easily overlooked.

The question of media authenticity and related social conflicts have previously followed in the wake of media revolutions (Enli, 2015). For instance, printing technology increased the speed of spreading information, which transformed fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European societies but also destabilized them (Pettegree, 2015; see also Langen & Stjernfelt, 2022). New ways to access information meant the loss of authority for former gate keepers, particularly the Catholic Church; anonymous hate speech, spread in pamphlets; and polarization and conflict about religious truth. The connection between the technology of printing and a century of religious wars in Europe might be discouraging. However, considering how practices, standards, and conventions led to the fact that having something “in black and white” (that is in writing or print) came to express a degree of reliability and trustworthiness, we can probably assume that it would be possible to stabilize the current communication complex in a similar fashion.

Following Lynch, one way to contribute to this process of stabilization is to map and understand the collision and variety of the epistemic rules that are in place in different media contexts (2016, 60). In recent years, significant work has been done for a better understanding of some of the disruptive phenomena we mentioned: mapping post-truth politics (McIntyre, 2018), exploring the various reasons behind the amplified spreading of false and misleading information (Zimdars & McLeod, 2020; Farkas & Schou, 2020; Tandoc, 2019; Bakir & McStay, 2018; Althuis et al., 2018), and the characteristics of conspiracy theories and the role of human bias in knowledge communication (Butter & Knight, 2020). Scholars insist on defending and reconstructing the concept of truth (Zuidervaart et al., 2013; Benson & Stangroom, 2007) and the relationship between trust and knowledge communication (Krämer, 2017; Salvi & Turnbull, 2017). In this volume, we contribute to this process by exploring how reliable, trusted, truthful information is shaped by the media involved.

Truth Claims Across Media approaches truthful communication across different media types as well as cultural and medial contexts. We approach media in a broad sense and explore the impact of material and medial aspects in all forms of human communication, thus looking beyond what is called “the media” in everyday speech. Whether we think of journalism, cinema, literature, or social media, in each media context, facts and experiences are treated and mediated differently in complex systems that integrate material, sensorial, semiotic, and cultural aspects. Different conventions and social contexts form what Lars Elleström (2021) calls qualified media types such as news, cinema, social media forums, or visual arts. More basic media types, such as texts and images, integrate differently in, for example, a comic strip, a graphic memoir, a news article, or a meme. However, all these different media types with different conventions converge on our digital devices turning into affordances that we can choose and pick from (Helles, 2013). As a consequence, even different forms of truth claims collide. The texts and images of a graphic memoir and a news feature not only look and are produced differently; but we also approach and evaluate them with different forms of truth expectations.

Therefore, we need to be more specific about whether media products convey knowledge about observable facts, personal experiences, or beliefs, and more specifically, how truth claims are manipulated by fakes and are negotiated in art. Truth Claims Across Media explores the epistemological question of how different kinds of truth claims collide, merge, or are confused. To this end, the volume brings together various media types and contexts, including journalism and literature, the arena of press conferences, documentaries and mockumentaries, images in political magazines and on Instagram, horror movies, screen biofiction, and (computer) games to increase data literacy.

1.2 Truth Claims Across Media: The Intermedial Approach

This volume explores the implicit truth claims of different media types, understood as the implicit reasons why and in which ways we conceive them as truthful to the physical and social world. We approach these different media contexts and their different truth claims from an intermedial perspective. Historically, intermedial theory developed from the study of artistic media such as literature, film, music, and visual arts and looks at how they integrate, transfer, and transform media characteristics, including what is perceived as media form or media content (Elleström, 2021; Rippl, 2015; Clüver, 2007; Rajewsky, 2005; Wolf, 1999). With our approach, we highlight that intermediality is more broadly useful. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Lars Elleström (2021), we highlight intermediality as a tool to explore all kinds of relationships between dissimilar media types, between different qualified media types such as news and literature, and between (or within) specific media products, such as news features and short stories. Elleström’s approach to intermediality departs from the characteristics that all kinds of media products have in common, which he calls the media modalities. Intermedial analysis then can highlight, for instance, how transmedial characteristics such as rhythm or narrativity play out in specific ways in different media and how all types of media adaptation join transfer and transformation (Elleström, 2014).

The intermedial perspective of finding similarities without ignoring crucial differences provides a valuable vantage point for understanding communication in a digitized society. Media and communication scholars therefore increasingly draw on intermediality as a concept to understand the hybridity, convergence and malleability of digital media and to explore the relationship between mass and interpersonal communication, the digital and the analogue (Rice, 2017; Helles, 2013; Jensen, 2016). In this introduction, we use an intermedial perspective to address the different forms of truthfulness that arise from material, perceptual, and semiotic media choices. We tease out the similarities and differences between how truth claims are made and how different forms of truthfulness are perceived in different media contexts. We argue that if one wants to better understand the attraction of conspiracy theories, why what is fake news for some is alternative information to others, or why post-truth politics can afford to ignore truthfulness with factual events, we need to look closer into how factual truth claims interact with other forms of claims that promise to be coherent with and thus truthful to conviction, beliefs, and experiences.

The challenge is that the truth claims that are at stake in a media context usually are not discussed explicitly. While the intermedial study of truthfulness and truth claims across media is still emerging (Bruhn et al., 2021; Elleström, 2018; see also Tseng, 2022), the implicit truth claims made by media products become first visible when metadiscourse draws attention to them or when scandals reveal that claims of truthfulness are not always sincerely made. Fake identities on social media, so-called native advertisements that imitate journalism, or the visual accuracy of the fictional events of deep fakes can lead to situations where audiences confuse constructed mediation with actual presence, in what Gunn Enli calls authenticity scandals (2015). These confusions also arise out of the fact that audiences address one kind of media product with the truth claims of another. Authenticity scandals tend to happen when new technology challenges existing conventions and evaluations of truth claims in a specific context. With the arrival of deep fake, for instance, the indexical truth claim of the moving images cannot be trusted by default to the same extent anymore. With the widespread use of artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, conversation is no more automatically an indexical sign for human presence.

The broad transmedial scope of this volume can therefore be seen as a first intermedial step that brings similarities and dissimilarities between truth claims across media contexts to the forefront. The individual articles explore the questions of trust, different truth claims, and truthfulness in a specific media context. The articles, spanning across disciplines, present different methodologies in addressing the questions of truth claims and truthful representation in the media types of journalism, literature, cinema, and photography as well as in social media and digital educational games. Some offer concrete approaches and describe projects that deal with topical social challenges like disinformation strategies, knowledge communication in the pandemic and media literacy. Others focus on how artistic media types, in the form of metafictive literary texts, graphic novels, documentaries, mockumentaries, and biofiction, highlight and negotiate the complexity of different forms of truthful representation. Not all articles explicitly deal with digital media, but all of them draw attention to collisions between conflicting truth claims that can be encountered in the digital sphere as well. All the essays demonstrate that truthfulness in communication needs to be specified and explored more carefully in research. Statements of truth are situated in a context; they are grounded in implicit truth claims that should be made specific, and the experience of truthfulness can relate to different aspects of the social world. Taken together, the articles build a constellation of the transmedial characteristics that informative, artistic, and interactive media share, even if these transmedial characteristics are used and combined differently.

In the following section, we start to map the common underlying similarities of different kinds of truth claims. We present “truth claim” and “truthfulness” as concepts that enable us to spell out the prerequisites of the perception of truthfulness in communication in different contexts.

1.3 Truths, Truth Claims, Truthfulness, and Trust

The philosopher William James describes truth as an agreement with reality (James, 2008 [1907], 136). While this minimal definition might be accepted by many, philosophers do not agree on how this agreement is reached, whether in correspondence to facts, in coherence with a set of beliefs or propositions, or within a certain limit of inquiry (Burgess & Burgess, 2011, 14). However, although truth can be defined as a form of agreement and the result of a process, it is often referred to as if it were an object in the social world that can be found or revealed. Thus, speaking of truth is always a shorthand that refers to knowledge that can be defined as “correct beliefs” or “true opinions” because they are justified or grounded (Klauk, 2020, 187–188; Lynch, 2016, 12–14). This process of grounding opinions, of gaining knowledge by forming agreements is based on different social acts, sets of rules, power relations, and trust relationships.

The lack of consensus about the ontological status of truth also might indicate that different aspects are relevant in the empirical knowledge production. When we speak of empirical, legal, poetic, or subjective truth, the cultivation of true beliefs is based on different operations and rules, and they refer to knowledge about different aspects of the social world. The steps to justify alleged truths often remain implicit (Klauk, 2020, 188). They are, in other words, socially constructed, but we want to stress that they should also be seen as media-dependent. Following what philosopher Ian Hacking points out, that “every new kind of truth-telling requires a new technology” (Hacking, 2005, 171), we claim that new technologies and media types might also affect practices of truth-telling.

The interplay of different aspects and the changes in agreements all motivate a closer look into the truth claims of media and how they contribute to the perception of truthfulness in different ways. When film and media scholar Tom Gunning discusses the truth claims of photography, he understands truth claims as the reasons implicitly brought forth by a media product, looking at how and in what ways we can trust it (Gunning, 2004). These claims appeal to the audience’s knowledge of the media’s production process, the acts usually involved in creating the media product, and what kind of knowledge these media products usually convey. Gunning discusses the truth claim of photography as based on the indexicality of the production process but also informed by the detailed iconicity of the photographic image. These implicit reasons, Gunning stresses, do not say anything about the actual truthfulness of a specific media product; instead they are “a claim made for it based on our understanding of its inherent properties” (Gunning, 2004, 42). On the contrary, fakes pretend to draw on the truth claims of production in a rhetorical way without in reality being grounded in the actual production process. Still, truth claims provide an explanation for why we heuristically tend to draw a specific form of knowledge from certain media types. The truth claim of journalism, for instance, presents the professional work of journalists as a form of knowledge-production based on accounts of recent events (Ekström & Westlund, 2019; Carlson, 2017). The journalistic authority and its truth claim is based on specific practices such as the observation of eyewitnesses and research as well as a specific form of presentation, which includes the indexicality of photographs and the quotation sources (Haapanen, 2017; Kroon Lundell, 2010).

While the concept of truth claims provides the reasons why we should trust a particular media product, the concept of truthfulness can be used to better describe what kind of knowledge about the actual world we can draw from a specific media product. Truthfulness is often understood as a personal quality and a form of honesty. Philosopher Bernard Williams’s understanding of truthfulness as a “commitment” to or “respect” of truth highlights truthfulness as a personal quality that is based on accuracy in the search for truth and sincerity when communicating the truth to others (Williams, 2002, 11). Yet when John Hyman explores truthfulness in painting, he stresses that even media can be truthful, in respect to what they represent and how they represent it (Hyman, 2021, 498).

When intermedial scholar Lars Elleström approaches truthfulness in communication from a semiotic perspective, he describes truthfulness in communication as an indexical relationship that connects communication with the actual world in the form of “extracommunicational truthfulness” but also has an inward direction that “establishes intracommunicational coherence” (2018, 423). This semiotic approach makes it possible to describe “what kind of external truthfulness can be expected from certain media products” (ibid., 444). Indexical signs form what semiotician Peirce calls “real connections” that are based on contiguity (ibid., 434). Therefore, indexical signs, traces, and symptoms are used as proofs, as they can convince us of the presence or existence of something else that we cannot immediately perceive with our senses (like a former presence or an inner state). This proof, however, needs to be constructed. While smoke is an indexical sign of fire, smoke rising above the treetops will not tell what kind of fire it is or who started it. A fingerprint proves that a specific person has been at a specific place but does not explain why or when. Therefore, photographs used as indexical signs, such as in legal contexts, “can only be the supporting evidence for a statement” (Gunning, 2004, 42). Photographs of red marks on skin can be presented as proof of physical abuse or a rash. At the same time, there are photographs that circulate in social media as proof for a specific event although they have been taken at other occasions. Understanding truthfulness as an interplay of various indexical relations helps us understand why the spreading of mis- and disinformative narratives cannot be countered by fact-checks alone but calls for an approach that considers how facts and narratives integrate.

Elleström’s indexical approach to truthfulness enables an intermedial analysis of the construction of truthfulness. It allows us to identify similarities between the truth claims of different media types and to differentiate expected from actually perceived forms of truthfulness. Truthfulness in communication needs to connect to the actual world and also provide or guarantee coherence. When reading, listening, or watching news, we not only look at the facts but also respond to how well they connect. All forms of knowledge communication depend on narratives and need to connect to previous knowledge. Facts are never isolated and even fictive stories need to be anchored in our previous knowledge in order for them to make sense to us. Thus, external and internal indexical relationships communicate different forms of knowledge in different kinds of media products, though they integrate differently in, say, a scientific report and a fantasy novel.

To understand the current information disorder, it is not enough to focus either on facts, narratives or human biases. If we start to explore more in detail how the extracommunicational truthfulness of facts relates to the intracommunicational coherences of narratives and how their relationships either confirm or challenge expectations and beliefs, we can analyze truthfulness in communication in a more fine-grained manner than using binaries like true and false, fake and authentic, and fiction and fact. We can start to describe what type of truthfulness we expect and actually perceive as well as which kinds of truth claims are made and may be colliding. An intermedial perspective allows us to spell out how facts, narrative, and audience engagement play out differently in different media types and to explore both underlying similarities without forgetting crucial differences between media products. We can consider the interplay of different forms of truth claims that go along with the empirical objectivity of facts, the coherences provided by narratives, and the psychological biases of personal engagement that are appropriate in some contexts but problematic in others.

In considering this interplay of truth claims, we need to address how the digital transformation has changed the practices of knowledge production and how these changes relate to an increased demand for authenticity.

1.4 Knowledge Communication, Authenticity, and Witnessing in a Changing Mediascape

Knowledge communication is built on trust and the willingness to rely on others. Most of our world knowledge is not only mediated but formed in what Sybille Krämer (2017) calls “epistemic dependence,” which means that “[w]e rely on being informed through others in order to be able to know anything at all.” Krämer stresses therefore that “thinking and knowing are terms for fundamentally cooperative actions” (ibid., 247).

Similar to what the technologies of writing and printing have done before, digital technology allows more people to profit from the knowledge of others without meeting them in person, therefore changing the way to create knowledge. When media prevent us from relying on our senses to evaluate information from others in face-to-face communication, we have to find strategies to identify reliable information that we can trust quickly and heuristically.

Digital technology already affects our understanding of how and to what extent we trust texts and images. Digital texts and images look similar to their printed equivalent, but—due to their digital materiality—they can be more easily combined, changed, and manipulated (Manovich, 2002). Due to its production process, printed text provides a different form of truth claim. Printed text published in book form and distributed by publishing houses vouches for a series of gatekeeping and editing procedures that cannot be expected by default from texts that only exist in digital form. A lot of digital text that now appears in Times New Roman font on the screen would have been written by hand or machine typed and be visibly recognizable as drafts before the arrival of word-processing software. A similar change in trust and practices goes for the digital image. Digital photographs are still indexically connected to a camera that has captured an image at a specific time and place (Gunning, 2004, 40). However, the relationship between the indexical and iconic relationships has changed.

With the development of the internet, digital technology makes vast amounts of information more accessible, and it offers information in a networked, interactive way. One important change in the history of the internet and new media is the move from what is generally called Web 1.0—the web that for most general and non-expert users was a read-only web and was retroactively labelled as “the web of documents” (Shivalingaiah & Naik, 2008, 499) or “a web of cognition” (Fuchs et al., 2010, 42)—to the read-write, communicative Web 2.0, which was then followed by the emergence of social media platforms. While in Web 1.0, more similar to analog mass media, the majority of users were consumers of the information, in Web 2.0 they are given the opportunity to not only react to the existing knowledge and interact with other users but, moreover, generate and share content to a much greater extent than before. Being at both ends of knowledge production thanks to the interactive and participatory affordances of what now is called social media, individuals found unprecedented possibilities for claiming truthfulness while also facing complex challenges in trusting media products and other users. The complexity has deepened with later developments in AI and machine learning and the general dependency on applications. The information one receives is regulated by the user’s history in the communication algorithms of search engines. Since these search engines provide search results based on previous queries, the results of internet searches are different for everyone. In this way, while different platforms have become more user-friendly, and media users are given individually tailored access to different applications, the task of distinguishing truthful from fake has become more complex.

Thus, a lot of information we find on the internet cannot be trusted by default. What Lynch calls “google knowing,” knowledge based on the use of search engines, gives instantaneous answers but is still dependent on others (Lynch, 2016, 25). The kinds of data and information we can get via internet search results are not selected or edited by gatekeeping experts. Instead, they have to be actively evaluated by the user. Therefore, by deduction, the same data can lead to different conclusions depending on different worldviews. As a consequence, the epistemic rules, practices and logical strategies differ from the rules for printed knowledge. The digital materiality of texts and images and the digital networked knowledge production also leads to new practices for how to trust and verify information, including methods such as the post-published editing and discussion of Wikipedia entries or digital image verification using reverse image search.

The changes in technology also have repercussions for the power relations of what Foucault calls the regimes of truth, that is, the discourses, practices, institutions, and actors that are involved in the production of statements considered true in a specific historical and social context. The liberal truth regime of democratic societies builds on a scientific model of truth production by expert authority and accepts objective facts beyond political contest (Foucault, 1980, 131–132). This regime is destabilized when gatekeepers like experts and their hierarchical forms of truth-telling are drawn into question. Apart from truth regimes, Foucault describes the market as a competing site of truth that produces a market price truthful to the current value of things (Foucault, 2008, 31). In the fragmented digital public sphere, media scholars discern a regime that is more characterized by “truth markets,” what Harsin would call “a regime of post-truth” (Harsin, 2015). A lot of what is shared and amplified in digital networks engages and calls for emotional response. In this kind of communicative situation, the aim is to control the attention economy. Thus, “the domination of truth regimes now demands popular attention to/participation in its discursive games” (Harsin, 2015, 331).

When established practices and institutional actors are called into question, other criteria will lead people’s decisions about which ideas and actors to trust. The demand for authenticity, Sybille Krämer points out, tends to arise in knowledge crises. In situations of insecurity and ignorance, claims of authenticity create qualities that cannot be produced in other ways (Krämer, 2012, 25). In these situations, authenticity promises to put us in the presence of something that lies out of reach, in the past or beyond our perception. A material authenticity expresses a truthful connection with the past via historical objects, rituals, and traditions. As a personal quality, authenticity refers to human behavior that truthfully or sincerely expresses the inner states. However, although authenticity is called for in times of uncertainty, the concept at the same time tends to destabilize the acceptance of social conventions, as a claim of authenticity also justifies the breaking of social rules (Taylor, 1992). Krämer indicates how the material and the personal, the social and the individual often work together if authenticity is at stake (Krämer, 2012, 19).

The relationship between media and authenticity is contradictory. Many media types promise an experience of immediacy, a form of mediation that gives (seemingly unmediated) access to a sense of presence (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). This sense of mediated presence needs to be constructed in specific ways, thus the introduction of every new medium has redefined authenticity (Enli, 2015, 109). And while new media offer new forms of contact, they are at the same time accused of inauthenticity and loss of presence. This pattern can be traced throughout history, from Plato’s critique of writing technology to the need for a rhetoric of sincerity in the wake of the printing revolution and the Protestant Reformation (Trilling, 1972) to Walter Benjamin’s (2018 [1936]) reflections about the aura of the original artwork in relation to its audio/visual reproduction. Currently, digital technology has created new needs for authentication that ensure real human presence in computer-based communication.

The claim of authenticity is thus a rhetorical, paradoxical claim for immediacy that is put forward with a “rhetoric of sincerity” (van Alphen et al., 2009) or with different forms of authenticity markers (Enli, 2015; Gilmore, 2007, 49–50). This claim of authenticity is used as a commercial selling point (Craig & Cunningham 2017; Gilmore & Pine 2007) but increasingly also as a political stance (Parry-Giles, 2014). Donald Trump’s success illustrates how personal authenticity, namely, a claim to coherence between outer actions and inner convictions, can, in certain contexts, compensate for the lack of empirical coherence with facts. Digital media and technology highlight other paradoxes. YouTubers and influencers construct media personas that heavily rely on the promise of personal authenticity (Jensen et al., 2021), yet CGI or deep fakes put us in the presence of personalities, creatures, and events that may never have existed.

Knowledge communication, authenticity, and mediation all connect to the act of witnessing. At first glance, the embodied testimony of eyewitnesses who vouch with bodily presence for their testimony appears to be the opposite of mediated communication. However, media theorists John Durham Peters (2001) and Sybille Krämer (2015) argue the reverse. They present the knowledge gained through the testimony of a witness as a model for how we gain knowledge through media. This highlights that all knowledge beyond our own experience and perception relies on trusting the testimony of either persons or media products (Krämer, 2015, 149). The role of media as (un)reliable witnesses in knowledge communication then draws attention to evaluation practices. Concerning information retrieved on the internet, two different epistemological stances are possible (Krämer, 2017). You can consider this information as first-hand knowledge actively gained from visual perception and deduction in your research, or you can choose to focus on the epistemic dependence of relying on authority and testimony of experts and media products.

This evaluation of media products as reliable or unreliable witnesses reveals further complexities. Current credibility research indicates how processes of evaluation are transforming. Credibility research differentiates between the credibility of the source, medium, and message (Flanagin & Metzger, 2010). When media products are shared online, different sources (such as friends, experts, and institutions), media types (such as social media and journalism), and communicative acts nest into each other. When assessing credibility, audiences merge objective and subjective parameters and respond to specific cues, and credibility research notes the decline of authority cues and an increase in identity cues (Hilligoss & Rieh, 2008). The affective and emotional response creates a specific form of truth claim, as shown by Chew and Mitchell’s study on interactivity in life-writing (2015).

As we explain above, the interrelations of knowledge communication, witnessing, and authenticity in the current complex mediascape speak to various aspects of making and perceiving truth claims across different media. The articles in this volume, grouped under four topics that are introduced in the following section, address different truth claims, different claims of authenticity, and the entanglement of different levels of testimony and evaluation while shedding light on the complexities and interdependence of these claims and practices.

1.5 Disposition of This Volume

1.5.1 Part I Factual Evidence and Coherence in Knowledge Communication

The volume begins with three articles focusing on journalistic practices and knowledge communication by authorities that discuss not only the reliance on factual evidence but also narrative structures and strategies of coherence that shape communicative events. Taken together, they provide examples of manipulative, truthful, informative, and complex usages of multimodal resources by gatekeepers in communicating knowledge or extending political agendas.

In “A Story Too Good to Be True” Beate Schirrmacher looks at manipulations of factual narratives in journalistic practices. Her article provides a comparative analysis of two journalistic features with a rhetorical and narratological method that works as a kind of reverse engineering and is developed from intermedial and semiotic conceptualizations of truth claims. By offering a fine-grained analysis of the ways facts, narrative tools, and pre-existing experiences interact in journalistic narratives, this article opens up for developing rhetorical tools for supporting informative and detecting misinformative narrative strategies.

Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska’s “The Montage of the National Past” analyzes covers of contemporary Polish right-wing magazines, looking at how the historical references are juxtaposed and appropriated. The article foregrounds the importance of magazine covers as “crucial elements of the iconosphere” and demonstrates how juxtaposing different visual elements from different historical contexts can lead to an abuse of history. This, Saryusz-Wolska argues, is manifest, for example, in the way polarizing associations on Polish right-wing magazine covers are constructed between the contemporary political agents and events and the notorious ones in the past.

Byrman and Westum, in “Trustworthiness in the Swedish strategies for Covid-19,” analyze recordings of press conferences of the Swedish Public Health Agency at a few crucial moments during the pandemic. Their article maps out the discursive and communicative strategies of the Swedish authorities in transferring knowledge to the public while looking at the collisions of truth claims and expectations. Highlighting the way multimodal resources and communicative patterns are used in these communicative events, they demonstrate how knowledge communication by official gatekeepers is far from straightforward.

1.5.2 Part II Personal Quests for Empirical Truth: Testimony and Media Hybridity

Both articles in the second section focus on hybrid media products that showcase personal quests for empirical truth when confronted with historical disasters. Both discuss various types of indexicality and look at how hybrid materiality is used to mediate the complexities of the tension between searching for factual evidence and forming coherent narratives.

In “Unveiling Truth and Truthfulness in the Graphic Memoir Heimat,” Camila Figueiredo analyzes Nora Krug’s celebrated graphic memoir with a focus on the way different intermedial relationships form the claims to extracommunicational truthfulness and how coherence is created by authenticity and testimony. Figueiredo maps out Krug’s journey in-between media in her quest through archives and memories to find out about her family members’ involvement with the Nazi regime during the Second World War, demonstrating the unsolvable tensions and insurmountable gaps in witnessing the past.

In her article, Nafiseh Mousavi approaches another hybrid media product and an example of media witnessing in a more recent historical disaster, namely, the ISIS genocide of Yazidis in 2014. In focus is the documentary film Night and Fog in Kurdistan in which drawn images are integrated with recorded images. Focusing on the mobilized drawn images, Mousavi analyzes the various functions these drawn images uphold in the documentary practice and the multiple media relationships that frame them. Through this analysis, the article looks at the way hand-drawn images are used to fill the representational gaps and how they affect the truth claims of the documentary film.

1.5.3 Part III Fact and Fake Across Media Types

The articles in the third section look at specific genres across different media that are conventionalized through an interaction between concepts of fact and fake: mockumentary, screen biofiction, author interviews, and Zombie movies. The cases these articles work with are distinguished in the way they play with and challenge the conventions of the genre and, further, the binary understandings of authentic/true/factual vs. fake/false/fictional.

In “Fictionality as a Rhetorical Tool in Political Mockumentary Films; The Interplay of Fictionality and Factuality in C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America,” Tamás Csönge demonstrates how an alternative version of the past can work as a relevant criticism of the present. Csönge defines fictionality and factuality in the frame of rhetorical narratology and positions the political satirical discourse of mockumentaries in general and C.S.A in particular in such framework. The article argues that interweaving fact and fiction in cases like C.S.A effectively reveals the constructedness and historicity of norms while drawing on past and referring to the present.

In “Clemens J. Setz on Bursting the Reader’s Reality Bubble,” Nataša Muratova and Anna Obererlacher map the contours of author interviews in a new way, not as a direct window into the author’s mind but as an element of larger practices of authorial staging that interweave fact and fiction and are framed by discourses of authority as well as claims to authenticity in the so-called “presence culture.” The case they analyze, Bot–Gespräch ohne Autor (2018), with its presentation of a fictional author interview in the form of a Turing test, allows them to shed light on the intricacies of the relationship between the author, claims of authenticity and the reader’s truth expectations with the help of the intermedial concept of media representation on one hand and the narratological concept of faketional on the other.

Anna Gutowska’s article discusses another dimension of presentism in a genre that gets part of its legitimacy from its reliance on the extracommunicational truthfulness of historical characters and their lives, namely, biofiction. Studying The Great (2020), a biofiction series about the early years of the reign of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, “‘An Occasionally True Story’: Biofiction, Authenticity and Fictionality in The Great (2020)” demonstrates how the deliberate inaccuracy of The Great works as a claim to a more authentic understanding of history. Gutowska does that by situating The Great in the broader frames of the relevant genres of biofiction such as queen pics and discussing examples of the deliberate inaccuracy of the series. The author highlights the affective results of such strategies in shocking the audience and presenting them with the derangements of history.

In “Impure Realism, Pure Eventness, and Horror Cinema in the Post-truth Era,” Yeqi Zhu argues for a revised understanding of horror cinema in general and Zombie-movies in particular, not as escapist but, rather, as a genre that addresses contemporary tensions, such as the current tensions of a post-truth era. Her article offers a case study of the 2017 Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead, a zombie movie about making a zombie movie, and discusses in detail how realism is approached in this movie with a focus on communication.

1.5.4 Part IV Interaction, Trust, and Truthfulness on Social Media

Moving from aesthetic media genres to social media, the articles in the fourth section focus on the complexities of truth claims and trustworthiness in social media interactions.

The section begins with an article that addresses the problem of misinformation in an empirical and participatory way. In their article “Developing Misinformation Immunity in a Post-Truth World: Human Computer Interaction for Data Literacy,” Elena Musi, Kay L. O′ Halloran, Elinor Carmi, and Simeon Yates not only discuss the challenges of online communication but take a step further. The authors present a practical example of how to deal with digital misinformation by developing and examining the Fake News Immunity chatbot. The chatbot educates users in recognizing misinformation by providing them with tools for identifying fallacies. The article and the empirical experiment of the chatbot demonstrate how interactive aspects of online communication can be used for training users in digital literacy.

In a less interventional and more observatory study, Augustė Dementavičienė, Fausta Mikutaitė, and Aivaras Žukauskas analyze interactions in two Lithuanian anti-vaccination Facebook groups in search of patterns of affects and narratives that shape the discourses of truthfulness. “When the Post-Truth Devil Hides in the Details: A Digital Ethnography of Virtual Anti-Vaccination Groups in Lithuania” identifies four main categories in shaping the discourse in these group: crisis of trust, competion with science, populism, and anti-public discourse. The authors argue for context-specific understandings of post-truth. As the article shows, the dominant Western conceptualizations of concepts like post-truth prove to be inadequate in contexts such as post-Soviet societies where the relationship between authority and authenticity has a complicated history.

Finally, in “Towards a grammar of Manipulated Photographs: The Social Semiotics of Digital Photo Manipulation,” Morten Boeriis adopts a multimodal social semiotic approach in looking at digital photo manipulation in relation to validity and trustworthiness. As a step towards establishing a “grammar” of digital manipulation, the article provides a detailed categorization of digital photo manipulation tools and practices that can lead to the manipulation of interpersonal, ideational, and structural meaning potentials. In light of that, Boeriis argues for the interpersonal validity system as a frame for assessing photographic claims of trustworthiness, a framework that positions photo manipulations not in the narrow binaries of fake and authentic but in dynamic communicative relationships.

1.6 Conclusion: The Dynamics of Truthfulness and Media

Zooming out and looking at the different sections together, we can see how recurring questions and problems emerge in very different media contexts. In a way, in many of the discussions, the core problems are to see how facts are made coherent in various informative, testifying and artistic forms of communication, and how different ways of making sense of the facts and empirical data lead to different forms of engagement in communication. The creative play with fact and fiction in literature or film is not only a self-reflexive metadiscourse but negotiates the very paradoxes that trouble a polarized public discourse. Empirical facts and data, personal experience and interactive engagement are closely intertwined in online communication, and they need to be brought together when designing tools for digital literacy.

However, seeing the similarities in truth claims across media is different from saying that all truth claims are valid everywhere. Instead, the intermedial perspective allows for a more fine-grained description of how fundamental similarities in the interplay of facts, coherence, and engagement play out differently in media specific contexts. For instance, authentic expression may be a valid truth claim to communicate subjective perspectives, but it needs to be connected with empirically based statements about the social world in witnessing and testimony. With a dedicated quest for facts, a desire for coherence and a healthy self-awareness about the fallacies, we are more prepared for responding to challenges of communication in a digitized society. We hope that this volume provides a point of departure for future research that further explores the interplay between facts, coherence, and engagements in and across different media.