Personal epistemologies of the media: selective criticality, pragmatic trust, and competence–confidence in navigating media repertoires in the digital age

While the perils of social media, fake news, and an alleged distrust in legacy media have attained considerable public attention, the implications of these public narratives for their audiences have remained understudied. The aim of this article is to identify consequences of an emerged “fake news and post truth-era-narrative” for media users’ personal epistemologies, media beliefs, and news navigation practices from a media repertoire perspective. Forty-nine in-depth media-biographical interviews with people from three different age groups and with different media repertoires were conducted. Based on the study, the three interrelated dimensions (1) selective criticality, (2) pragmatic trust, and (3) competence–confidence were developed to analyze users’ media and news navigation. These three dimensions can be applied to other scenarios to investigate how people navigate their media repertoires and interact with the news in general