The Epistemic Dimension of Populist Communication: Can Exposure to Populist Communication Spark Factual Relativism?

Populist communication has taken on a central epistemic dimension in recent years. This means that populist blame attributions are often targeting established institutions of knowledge, such as scientists and mainstream media. It also implies that the objective status of conventional knowledge is subject to delegitimization discourses. Despite the potential consequences of epistemic populism on people’s trust in established information, we know little about how it is constructed online, and how it may impact citizens’ perceptions of facts and knowledge. Therefore, for this Chapter, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of truth claims on the hyper-partisan media platform Breitbart in the US. In a subsequent experiment, I explored the effects of exposure to epistemic populism on perceptions of factual relativism. The main findings of the content analysis indicate that truth claims on Breitbart follow a populist logic, given that people-centric knowledge claims were emphasized whilst established claims on truth and expert knowledge were delegitimized and flagged as ‘fake news.’ The experiment revealed that exposure to such populist claims on truth and knowledge did not result in a more relative understanding of objectivity and truth. Thus, even though populist communication undermines the ideas of objective expert knowledge by fuelling distrust in established truth claims, this attack on knowledge does not promote a more relative understanding of truth and knowledge among participants. In the chapter, different explanations and implications are presented. Among other things, the relatively high levels of perceived relativism toward facts in the studied population indicate that there is little room for populist communication to influence perceptions on truth. In addition, ideas about truth and knowledge can be regarded as stable traits, and populist communication may be more likely to strengthen and reinforce people-centric truth claims than to fuel general levels of relativism and skepticism toward the objective and fixed status of truth.