Beyond ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Media: Reasons for Using Alternative Media

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Christian Schwarzenegger, whose focus is on the use of alternative information sources by people who no longer trust the mainstream media. Historically, the latter have been key pillars of society, providing citizens with a shared and reliable set of news – but ‘the’ public sphere is now multiple, and there is no longer a guarantee that everyone will encounter the same set of news stories.

With this increasing diversity and fragmentation, the role of journalism as a social institution is increasingly contested; this also manifests in significant distrust in their ability to provide reliable and trustworthy information. This is not necessarily an increase in distrust across society, however, but especially also an increase in the intensity of distrust amongst those citizens who are already distrustful.

In this context, citizens may increasingly look towards new, alternative media options, especially online. Initially, such sources were especially linked with progressive politics – but more recently there has been a greater focus on the rise of alternative media on the populist right and far right of politics, which sometimes act as an ecosystem aligned with the relevant fringe parties.

Such media might then function as further catalysts of media scepticism and hostility – they may engender a general scepticism towards the media and politics, and users of such sources may increasingly fall into a number of categories: system sceptics who are fundamentally opposed to the status quo, agenda critics who are opposed to specific political issues, and casually discontent users who engage with alternative media more for interest and entertainment.

Of course, nobody ever uses all available media: we all have our own media repertoires. If users engage with alternative media, then, do these supplement or replace the use of more mainstream sources? How is this affected by the user’s media ideology? We might be able to understand these questions by thinking of the personal epistemologies of the media users: people are highly selectively critical about the media content they encounter; they are pragmatic about what to trust or distrust; and they have a distinct level of self-competence confidence, determining their beliefs in their ability to detect ‘fake news’.

The users of alternative may believe that legacy news are ‘fake’; their perception of the news may be affected by specific pivotal moments; and their use of alternative media may not imply that they trust those sources any more. These users may have a sincere longing for unbiased information, but their personal choices may still lead them to mainly use some of the least trustworthy sources. But none of this has much to do with a genuine binary of trust or distrust any more – much of this is contingent and contextual rather than a matter of choices in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ media.