Political Identity and Alternative News Media Consumption

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Isabella Glogger, whose interest is in reinforcing relationships between political identities and alternative news consumption. The focus here is especially on Sweden, where alternative media use has been on the rise especially on the right wing of politics, and has been connected with more pessimistic viewpoints on a variety of societal issues, especially also on climate change. Selective exposure tendencies have also been observed here, potentially generating more societal polarisation.

This is captured in the Reinforcing Spiral Model, which assumes that media effects and selective exposure are interconnected processes that reinforce each other over time. This may be more prevalent in right-wing alternative media, which are often more strongly anti-systemic, and also depend on the level of politicisation of societal issues in relation to personal identities.

The project tested this through a six-wave panel study of 2,000 participants between 2020 and 2022, focussing on issues relating to crime, the economy, and healthcare and assessing the use of five left- and five right-wing alternative media outlets.

Use of such media was highly correlated with the strength of perceptions on these issues, where left-wing alternative media use led to more optimistic, and right-wing alternative media use led to more pessimistic perceptions of these issues. This is stronger for highly politicised issues like crime, and weaker for less politicised issues like healthcare.

There was no evidence for any reciprocal effects between alternative media use and political beliefs, however, which challenges the Reinforcing Spiral Model. However, the timeframe of the study also needs to be taken into account here – the study ran during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have affected the patterns observed.