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ous cases, the newspaper denounced the disregard by the presiden-elect of facts and verified data, and pointed out that Trump and his advisors had “embraced” the concept of post-truth without any remorse whatsoever.

A few months later, Masha Gessen, an expert in Russia, published an extensive analysis in The New York Review of Books entitled “The Putin Paradigm”, in which she established a parallel between Putin and Trump based on the conviction shared by both leaders that “the lie is the message” (The New York Review of Books, 2016).

This brief editorial sample of some media sources of international reference serve to point out the dissonance between factual reality (what has actually happened) and the media reality represented in the dominant journalistic discourse (what they said was going to happen).

Votes that were cast in favour of both Trump and Brexit have shown a popular will - slightly greater in both countries - disso-nant with the discourse of the media, so it is worth asking the following question: Are analysts and experts making errors in interpreting election indicators? Were there signs that pointed in the direction of the final results that were simply ignored?

2. Post-truth and public opinion

There is no risk in thinking that the concept of post-truth has appeared on our agenda because of the need to have a performative linguistic resource that allows us to describe the features that deliberative democracy of the 21st century is adopting. Its use was multiplied by 2000% during 2015; hence, the English Oxford Dictionary selected it as word of the year: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford Dictionary, 2016).

The correlation between the concepts of public opinion and emotions or personal convictions inevitably reminds us of the scientific literature of the first third of the 20th century, when the so-called “mass society” experienced a crisis (Ortega y Gasset, 1930), and awareness was raised concerning the power of social communication as a kind of “shadow government” (Bernays, 1928), in which “shadow engineers” (Lasswell, 1935) were able to direct individual decisions and “manufacture consent” (Lippmann, 1922).

The idea, which in many cases involved the empirical application of Freud’s theoretical foundations of the subconscious, consisted of the belief that in a social environment duly shaped by propaganda, reasoning built on verified facts (logos) would be swept away by symbolic messages that appeal to the primary emotions of human beings (pathos), diminishing their rational analysis and provoking emotional responses.

Beneath the surface of these ideas, mistrust toward the ability of the average citizen to make the most appropriate decisions for the nation had been generated. Authors such as Walter Lippmann and others from the school of “democratic realism” (Westbrook, 1991), viewed the idea that each of us should acquire a competent opinion on all public affairs as intolerable and unfeasible (Lippmann, [1922] 2003: 43); There is no “omni-competent citizen” capable of deciding what is most ap-propriate in a rational, technical and informed way, because the world that we have to face from a political point of view is beyond our reach, vision and understanding (Lippmann, [1922] 2003: 41).