The concept of alternative media has fascinated scholars and students for decades, and that interest has only grown over the years. Armstrong (1981) initiated the earliest academic studies of the subject in his book A Trumpet to Arms. In that book, Armstrong tied the “alternative press” to social movement actors, activists, and Western counterculture. This connection between...

4Chan. Reddit. Breitbart. Infowars. StormFront. In the wake of the 2016 US presidential campaign, many people began to grasp the broad scope and powerful influence of right-wing alternative media that had previously been overlooked or deemed inconsequential to public discourse. The surge in far-right media activism that helped bring Trump to power likely marks the definitive emergence of...

In the fall of 2018, in the heat of the midterm election season, I conducted a research project with a group of graduate students at BGSU. In that project, we interviewed local party...

For several decades, conservatives in the United States have accused the mainstream media of “liberal bias,” so much so that it has become a formulated belief among many right-wing supporters. Republican politicians such as Sarah Palin have called established news organizations “lamestream media” for their seeming liberal bias (Barr 2009). Although there is a lack of...

Over the last two decades, research in the field of communication has woven together scholarship concerning alternative media (e.g., Atton 2002) and concepts associated with new social movement networks (e.g., Best 2005; Pickard 2006a). Such research illustrates how activist organizations utilize alternative media to build worldviews concerning power, construct strategies for resistance...

Past research concerning the study of alternative media has been haunted by serious critiques about their significance. Critics of past research have argued that alternative media do not have enough social or political impact to warrant academic inquiry and research. One of the best examples of this critique was made by the British cultural studies group Comedia (1984), described by Atton...

Increasingly, it is possible to see intersections between entertainment alternative media and political news in mainstream media. One of the most obvious intersections that can be seen is in the frequent use of producers of alternative media in mainstream news. Kenix (2011) has noted that there are intersections between mainstream and alternative media in terms of organizational practices; I have...

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were largely seen as deeply flawed candidates with glaring weaknesses. Pundits and potential voters viewed Trump as uninformed, racist, and sexist, and Clinton as untrustworthy and dishonest. In September 2016, shortly before their first debate, New York Times reporters Patrick Healy and Dalia Sussman wrote that only...

Fake news. Infotainment. The Fifth Estate. These are just a few of the labels used to describe a hybrid genre of entertainment that blends irony, parody, and satire with conventional forms of news and public affairs reporting (Basu 2018; Baumgartner and Morris 2006; Sotos 2007). Popular with audiences and scholars alike, satirical news such as The Onion, Real Time With Bill...

Recently, terms such as “alt-right,” “alt-light,” and “alternative facts” have moved alternative media and media activism closer to the center of the political mainstream. To anyone invested in the research field of alternative and activist media, this move has come with a strange side effect: Practices that used to be associated with social justice and...

This research aims to explore how bloggers and journalists in New Zealand conceptualized journalism as a profession—and their own perceived role within political journalistic practice—at a particular moment of...

The previous parts of this book explored the nature of entertainment-oriented alternative media, and their rising intersections with mainstream political communication. These media are typically one-way channels from producers to audiences, with little or no opportunity for feedback or interactivity. For the most part, these are print media (e.g., National Review, Z...

Alternative media are increasingly proving to be a crucial part of the media system in contemporary democracies. Being relatively small scale and having limited economic resources, such media have typically been pushed to the peripheries of political communication. However, socio-political changes and the rise of digital platforms have led to new forms of alternative media, which...

Indymedia was established in response to the November 1999 protests in Seattle, Washington against the World Trade Organization (WTO), as one of its founders expressed that he was “dismayed by all the activists who showed up to shut down the WTO with their hotmail and yahoo accounts” (“About us” 2009). When mainstream media coverage misconstrued and mischaracterized the...

Activist networks,1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Joshua D. Atkinson (PhD, University of Missouri) is an associate professor in the School of Media & Communication at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His research primarily focuses on the role of alternative media in western activism. Specifically, his research illustrates the ways in which activists utilize alternative media to construct contexts for communicative resistance....

This series encourages focused work examining the role and function of communication in the realm of politics including campaigns and elec-tions, media, and political institutions.