And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Baoning Gong, whose focus is on challenges to conventional journalism from the far right. Within hybrid media systems, such alternative media, including influencers, emerge as epistemic authorities in their own right. How do such actors position themselves in the hybrid media field?
This study distinguished right-wing news outlets, influencers, and anonymous Telegram channels as three groups of such actors, and examined their practices. How do they define what journalism is and should be; how do they reference legacy media; how do they perform their own values and roles?
The project selected seven entities per actor type, and examined their feeds during 2022 and early 2023. It examined references to journalism, references to legacy media, and related statements. There were references to their own role as media watchdogs, a strong delegitimisation of mainstream media outlets (with attacks on their supposed partisanship and bias, and references to a meta-frame describing a supposed hidden legacy media agenda).
Public service media (and ‘the media’ more generally) were especially targeted, with allegations of secret alliances between legacy media, progressive parties, and other actors; in this, however, critical legacy media reports were occasionally praised, and coverage in legacy media is operationalised for self-legitimisation too.
Actors claimed their own roles as journalists, media watchdogs, investigative journalists, and creators of counterpublics. The three different actor types compete with each other for the same audiences, yet at the same time there is also a division of labour between them (content production, content amplification, content distribution), also linked to the specific affordances of their platforms and formats.
There is evidence of a transnational strategy and narrative from these actors, responding also to what they perceive as transnational conspiracies on the legacy side. Their approaches to covering specific topics translate across those themes, and the aim is generally to continue to affirm the relevance of journalistic roles and values, but to displace legacy media outlets as legitimate actors occupying those roles.
