Feb 5, 2026 · 31 min · 14 segments
As generative AI and Deepfake technology has progressed over the last decade, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's never been more difficult to try to work out what is authentic and what is…
Ben AnsellHostNick ClarkGuestLona SorensenGuestEstelle LovettGuest
Tracy Dennis-TiwaryGuest
So if authenticity in fine art can be worth millions of dollars, then how high are the stakes of being authentic in politics, whether budgets are counted in billions or indeed trillions of dollars? Well, if you look at Donald Trump, it may be one of the factors that got him into the White House twice.
Lona Sorensen, Associate Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, says that authenticity is increasingly important in modern politics.
The authenticity of an object, the authenticity of a person, and authenticity in how people communicate.
We quite often use that in the context of a piece of art or culture, so something that has a provenance, for example, like a painting by Picasso.
But it's also used about authentic British traditions and authentic folk music, for example.
And politicians can mobilise this because they can argue that they want to protect a particular aspect of authentic British life that they define however suits them.
This is more about living the real you and being true to oneself in the way that you conduct your life.
So think about Trump as the embodiment of the American dream, the self-made man, and about Nigel Farage presenting himself as someone who's always been an ordinary kind of bloke down the pub and hasn't been tamed by Westminster or Brussels.
This is much more about quite often populist attacks on scripted politics, where there's a sense that politicians don't really mean what they say and that there's not a correspondence between their communications and their actual beliefs or opinions.
So if authenticity in fine art can be worth millions of dollars, then how high are the stakes of being authentic in politics, whether budgets are counted in billions or indeed trillions of dollars? Well, if you look at Donald Trump, it may be one of the factors that got him into the White House twice.
Lona Sorensen, Associate Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, says that authenticity is increasingly important in modern politics.
The authenticity of an object, the authenticity of a person, and authenticity in how people communicate.
We quite often use that in the context of a piece of art or culture, so something that has a provenance, for example, like a painting by Picasso.
But it's also used about authentic British traditions and authentic folk music, for example.
And politicians can mobilise this because they can argue that they want to protect a particular aspect of authentic British life that they define however suits them.
This is more about living the real you and being true to oneself in the way that you conduct your life.
So think about Trump as the embodiment of the American dream, the self-made man, and about Nigel Farage presenting himself as someone who's always been an ordinary kind of bloke down the pub and hasn't been tamed by Westminster or Brussels.
This is much more about quite often populist attacks on scripted politics, where there's a sense that politicians don't really mean what they say and that there's not a correspondence between their communications and their actual beliefs or opinions.
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