• discourse theory
• quantitative methods
• empty signifier
• disinformation
• Mouffe
• Laclau
• fake news
• truth
• post-truth

The thesis deals with the concept of “post-truth” and the way it was interpreted in the Italian public debate. The work presents a qualitative-cum-quantitative analysis of nearly 700 articles collected from the Italian news media between 2016 and 2019 and provide a comprehensive picture of the actual use of the word. The work is divided in three sections. The first explores the moments in which the concept of post-truth was conceptualized before its popularization in in 2016, provides a review of the Italian literature on the concept and presents the theoretical framework that informs the empirical work: that of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The second section offers an account of the sources, the criteria the research strategies followed in the empirical analysis. The third presents the empirical results and provides a final discussion on the use of the concept by addressing four research questions: 1) the way the debate on post-truth was covered by the Italian news media; 2) the meanings attributed to the concept of post-truth, 3) the subjects associated to it and 4) the utility of re-describing the debate in discourse-theoretical terms. A conclusive chapter summarizes the main arguments and argues for a negative assessment on the consistency and the utility of the notion of at hand, which proves to be nothing more than an index for the badness, wrongness or dangerousness of the manifold challenges contemporary democracies are faced with.