Call for Papers

American Television and the Rise of Post-Truth America

Submission Deadline, May 15, 2026.

Within the space of 10 years Americans elected a reality television star to the office of President of the United States: twice.  Historiographically speaking, however, such realization is already appreciated as a surface (or, perhaps, cumulative) representation of a way of thinking that has slowly churned in the American imagination for decades; but, as is now evident, this way of thinking has at its center a particular set of exchanges involving the evolution of 20th century American values into vastly unfamiliar 21st century contexts – and – most especially, the representations of American life depicted on television.  Put most succinctly – our purpose is the study of the evolution of “post-truth America” within the various imaginations of American television.

We invite proposals for chapter length studies of the phenomena of (to quote our title): American Television and the Rise of Post Truth America.  We encourage prospective contributors to think of “television” in its various 21st century representations.  Certainly, the evolution of vlogging has definitive roots in reality television aesthetics.  As does pod-casting.  Similarly, streaming television and the rise of the “prestige drama” (really, a form of 21st century America literature) has much to offer our perspective.  All told, we encourage contributors to think broadly and creatively about the very nature of “television” in 21st century cultural contexts and how new innovations have helped to shift a cultural consensus towards a post-truth paradigm.          

Ideas and perspectives to consider:

• American television has always been post-truth:
  • Certainly, when viewed through contemporary eyes, the westerns that captivated American audiences across the 1950s and 1960s are fundamentally post-truth in the sense that they solidified “the west” as America’s Mount Olympus despite the fact that the America depicted (Dodge City etc.) were centers of vast exploitation and human misery.
  • The family comedies that dominated the 1950s and 1960s (Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Donna Reed etc.) offer depictions of the American family recognizable to a small proportion of Americans.
• Rupert Murdoch became a US citizen in 1985; this a requirement for Murdoch to own and operate television station in the United States.  In 1987 the Regan administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine paving the way for the rise of partisan –  and often deeply conservative – cable news and talk radio.  Fox News began broadcasting in October of 1996.    
• The television series Cops debuted on Fox on October 9, 1986 and is now its 37th season.  Despite its cinema verité veneer it is in actuality a carefully curated form of police community relations – police have the final authority on what gets aired; a particularly interesting phenomena when coordinated with the rise in documented police killings (and abuse) dating from the Rodney King video  (1991). 
• Closer to our own time, it seems impossible to imagine a Donald Trump presidency in absence of Trump’s absorption of American television “spectacle” during the 1980s and 1990s and principally World Wrestling Entertainment (Trump as inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013) as well as shows like Jerry Springer that amassed a huge audience during the 1990s.
• It is important to consider how television aesthetics shaped the content and aesthetics of 21st century media and especially the phenomena of family vlogging - best exemplified by documentary Welcome to our Family and Shiny Hapy People.
• Finally, it is important to consider how the phenomena of “The Prestige Drama” with its emphasis on hyper-realism (The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, Mad Men) might present as a form of resistance to post-truth television.  For instance, it can well be argued that the purpose of a series like Mad Men is to expose the process by which strategies of post-truth were carefully cultivated in Madison Avenue advertising firms to (quite literally) “sell” the American dream and certainly the phenomena of the post-war housewife to the American public.      

The above, however, are intended to as serve as points of entry.  We are interested in our topic very broadly conceived.

Please send abstracts of no more 750 words to:

Ben Alexander, editor: bea3@columbia.edu 

Thomas Mullarney: tjm2210@columbia.edu

Submission Deadline, May 15, 2026. 

Ben Alexander teaches in the English and Film Studies Departments at both Columbia University and Barnard College.  Alexander teaches courses entitled, When American Television Became American Literature, History of American Television and (in proposal) American Television and Rise of Post-Truth America.  Alexanders’ co-edited volume, “This America Man”: The Literary and Cultural Substance of 21st Century American Television is at press with Brill (European Perspectives on the United States series).

Thomas Mullarney is a Film and Media Studies MA student at Columbia University.