Chapter Four: The Cultural Emergence of Fake News II: Postmodernism, Sensationalism and the Hyperreal

A number of texts, opinion-writers and political figures have insinuated that the relationship between fake news (disinformation dressed up as news stories and circulated as misinformation by trusting audiences and users) and Donald Trump’s election is akin to the relationship between propaganda and the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s (e.g., Carey, 2017, p. 5). While narratives that figure the return of Nazism can sometimes be informative as a warning, and also generate a great deal of pleasure for the imaginative amateur historian, the problem with framing fake news and disinformation as if it is a new form of Nazi propaganda is that it mis-reads the cultural conditions that make disinformation palatable and believable among certain sets of the public. German nationalism, the politics of Weimar resentment, and the persistence of Prussian imperialism in German cultural forms as it had had been built since the mid-1800s made the claims communicated by the propaganda machinery of the Nazi party believable to an otherwise sceptical German population (Fischer, 1986). The conditions that made the fake news stories about Donald Trump (among many other false narratives, conspiracy theories and problematic communication) are so markedly different from those of 1930s Europe that we may be talking about different planets.