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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019
Journal of Alternative & Community Media - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019
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The ‘other’ alternatives: Political right-wing alternative media
Authors: André Haller, Kristoffer Holt and Renaud de La BrosseAbstractThis special issue of the Journal of Alternative and Community Media presents five articles that examine right-wing alternative media from different countries and contexts: Brazil, the United States, Germany and Finland. They focus on different aspects of a phenomenon that has come to the forefront of public debate in recent years, due to the many apparently successful alternative media enterprises that can be characterised as conservative, libertarian, populist or far to extreme right wing on a political scale. While there has been much (and often heated) public debate about this, researchers tend to lag behind when it comes to new trends, and a transient and rapidly changing media landscape. The articles in this special issue are therefore especially valuable, since they all provide empirically grounded perspectives on specific cases that illustrate different parts of a large puzzle that is in much need of illumination. This special issue is of use not just to communication research, but also to the public debate on disinformation on the internet.
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Strange fruit: The rise of Brazil’s ‘new right-wing’ and the Non-Partisan School Movement
Authors: Richard Romancini and Fernanda CastilhoAbstractThe new right-wing Brazilian Non-Partisan School Movement (in Portuguese, Escola Sem Partido, or ESP) was created in 2004 to denounce ‘indoctrination in schools’. It has, however, had greater repercussions via a strong presence on social media. The objective of this article is to analyse these discussions on Twitter. ESP’s official discourse and theoretical discussions about the role of social networks supported this study. The content and network analyses of the tweets reveal the following relevant conclusions: the dissemination of content is much stronger than any discussion, on the part of both the new right wing and the left-wing partisans; there is a predominance of ESP supporters in a discussion that has characteristics of an ‘anti-public sphere’; communication between these two groups is weak; and the tone of the content spread by ESP supporters resonates with many features of president-elect Jair Bolsonaro’s communication style.
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User profiles for populist counter-media websites in Finland
Authors: Elina Noppari, Ilmari Hiltunen and Laura AhvaAbstractThis article examines the users of Finnish populist counter-media (PCM) websites with the aim of exploring their motives for consuming and engaging with populist online media content. The article is based on a qualitative analysis of 24 semi-structured, focused interviews. We conclude that consuming and engaging with populist counter-media content is typically motivated by scepticism and mistrust of legacy media journalism and aspirations of constructing and sharing representations and narratives that challenge those of the dominant public sphere. These efforts are often motivated by deeply held personal beliefs and political stances. Three user profiles are devised to illustrate different types of counter-media users: (1) system sceptics, who express all-encompassing societal mistrust; (2) agenda critics, who express politicised criticism towards media representations of selected themes; and (3) the casually discontent, who sporadically browse sites for alternative information and entertainment.
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Young, free and biased: A comparison of mainstream and right-wing media coverage of the 2015–16 refugee crisis in German newspapers
Authors: Gerret von Nordheim, Henrik Müller and Michael ScheppeAbstractRight-wing media have been growing in terms of readership and impact in recent years. However, comparative analyses that gauge linkages between mainstream and right-wing media in Europe are virtually missing. We pursued an algorithm-based topic-modelling analysis of 11,420 articles concerning the question of whether reporting of the leading German right-wing newspaper Junge Freiheit differed from that of mainstream media outlets in the context of the refugee crisis of 2015–16. The results strongly support this notion. They show a clear-cut dichotomy with mainstream media on one side and Junge Freiheit on the other. A time lag could be found, pointing to a reporting pattern that positioned Junge Freiheit relative to the journalistic and political mainstream. Thus, Junge Freiheit can be characterised as a ‘reactive’ alternative media outlet that is prone to populism: it stresses the national dimension of the crisis, embraces the positions of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and largely neglects complex international, and particularly European, implications.
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Framing the mass media: Exploring ‘fake news’ as a frame embedded in political discourse
Authors: Jan R. Riebling and Ina von der WenseAbstractThe recent growth of alternative media sites and sources has also seen the rise of an aggressive rhetoric decrying mass media or parts thereof as being untrustworthy and politically biased. While it is unclear whether the ‘fake news’ debate is directly connected with this, it is surely a framing of mass media. In this article, we use techniques of quantitative text analysis in order to analyse how the ‘fake news’ frame is structured and to understand its central determinants in terms of social context and political orientation. Using quantitative text analysis, we analyse the frame usage and semantic embeddedness in eight blogs. We find evidence for a generalised frame that tends to be independent of political orientation of the blog.
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US alt-right media and the creation of the counter-collective memory
More LessAbstractThe media play an important role in shaping the collective memory of their users. Popular movies, TV shows or commemorative newspaper texts influence the ways in which people remember and forget. Many scholars have attempted to describe this connection; however, little attention has so far been paid to alternative media. This article aims to analyse the features of the collective memory constructed by the media associated with the so-called alt-right (alternative right) movement in the United States. I argue that far-right media produce an ethnically exclusive collective memory, which consequently aims to counter the mainstream collective memory. The findings of this study come from the critical analysis of how the New York Times and Breitbart News engaged in a nationwide discussion on the Confederacy’s legacy that ensued in August 2017 after the decision to remove the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, VA and the mass protests that soon followed.
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