Topical Foci of German Alternative News Sites

The third speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Miriam Milzner and Vivien Benert, presenting a content-based classification of German alternative news media. Recent definitions of such alternative media have moved away from a focus on these media as supporting subaltern counterpublics, and towards a focus on the emergence of right-wing online media as self-proclaimed alternatives to the mainstream.

The present project, then, explores the extent to which German alternative media use topical foci as a means of establishing themselves as alternatives to the mainstream, and uses those topical foci to categorise a diverse selection of these media in comparison to the coverage choices of mainstream media outlets. It gathered all articles from the front pages of these sites over a three-week timeframe, and engaged in structural topic modelling of these articles to identify the topical foci of these outlets.

Clear patterns of difference and similarity emerged from this. Mainstream media cover sporting and tourism topics much more than alternative media, while alternative media focus more strongly on narrow, critical political topics; there is also some overlap where the content decisions of both are somewhat similar (e.g. on the labour market and government policy disputes).

There are also substantive differences between outlets, however: mainstream media as well as the Epoch Times cluster together, as do right-wing and left-wing outlets, respectively. Some outlets, like the conspiracist NachDenkSeiten and the investigative Krautreporter formed distinct separate clusters in their own right. The topical profiles of these various clusters are clearly different from one another, too. This means, of course, that we should not assume a functional equivalence between these distinct types of alternative media.