Publishing and truth in the 21st Century: Truthiness and celebrity publishing

Although truth and falsity have been issues of contention and debate in relation to publication for as long as works have thus been produced and circulated, discussions about postmodernism and relativity together with a series of high profile publishing hoaxes in the 20th century and early years of the new millennium ushered in new waves of anxiety around the idea of ‘truth’ in publication. These scandals underscored (and undercut) the ‘pact’ that was widely understood to exist between a published author and his or her readers – and upon which the reputation of publishers, and publishing as an institution, was largely built – that the author of a published work was who they purported to be and, when writing non-fiction, that such authors would be ‘telling the truth’ to the best of their abilities. American humorist Stephen Colbert’s 2005 re-coining of the 19th century word ‘truthiness’, which had originally been used to denote ‘truthfulness’, to signify how something could seem or be felt to be true, even if was clearly not so, encapsulates a new generation of complexity around truth in 21st century publishing, the most extreme aspects of which are perhaps best signified by the phenomena of when internet falsehoods are purposely published, and then repeatedly republished, as ‘news’ to both attract, and mislead and misinform readers. This chapter uses a case study of the publishing careers of the members of the reality television phenomena known as the Kardashian extended family, to tease out these concepts as well as the value of the terms ‘truth’, ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in contemporary publishing.