Mediatization, post-truth, and knowledge production about Covid-19 247 tive since the 1980s - of the dilution of the public sphere, which no longer functions outside the public space since the latter also includes the peripheral - territories of civil society where inter- ests, sensitivities, and the issues are born and develop, sometimes distant from traditional cultures and widely legitimized. In these symbolic spaces (which often also offer themselves as physical territories for comparison and debate), there are forms of civic engagement to develop, or legitimate, antagonistic, or contesting instances of dominant cultures emerge. Richard Miskolci (2021) defines the current public sphere as technical-mediatized because it materializes in the confluence between its molding by new technologies and the mediatization and commodification of politics. This context encourages individualistic and moral readings of the collective problems, creating, on the conservative side, moral entrepre- neurs and, on the progressive side, entrepreneurs of themselves. This new public sphere encourages the refusal of social mediators: institutions such as science, professional journalism, and justice, as well as the professionals who work in them. Miskolci then analyzes the attack on social mediators through how the university and its specialists in gender and sexuality found themselves in the crossfire between moral entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and identity militias on the other. Historical and structural inequalities no longer were addressed in the legal and public health register in favor of a moral framework beneficial to the extreme right in which both armies contributed to the strengthening of authoritarianism, and the attack on academic intellectuals, impoverishing the public debate. Moreover, the technical-mediatized public sphere op- erates a substantive change in the relationship with politics: “[…] the autonomization of the public sphere is inseparable from the emergence of notions, such as post-truth and alterna- tive facts, both used to justify disinformation and extend them to traditional media to influence public opinion” (Miskolci, 2021, p. 36). It also intensified a process of “criminalization of politics, opening the way for some politicians to convert into occasional moral entrepreneurs” (ibid., p. 38). Its most popular campaign platforms were those more about denouncing than proposing actions to combat moral, political, and economic corruption. Un-
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