The Concept of Alternative News

Alternative news sources strive to stand out in the media landscape by providing their own unique viewpoint on current affairs. This typically involves targeting audiences that share their political or ideological viewpoint, and using different forms of media (such as news aggregation or video) to convey this viewpoint (for instance Buzzfeed, Breitbart or Sputnik are some examples), though these news outlets usually attract less readers and thus generate less profit than mainstream channels.

Alternative news is often part of a wider dialogue on media's role and value in democratic societies, particularly its capacity to represent diverse perspectives and promote pluralism (Helberger 2011). Yet perspectives vary greatly when discussing alternative news; while some authors stress the democratic potential of media landscapes with room for multiple actors and perspectives while others suggest diversity leads to erosion of democratic legitimacy or may even lead to social unrest through hostile criticism or anti-democratic positions (Schulz and Hendrickx 2019).

Liberal democracies often hold dear the market-of-ideas ideal and new start-ups can provide a welcome alternative in an established media environment. Ideally, such alternative start-ups should adhere to professional standards striving for balance and impartiality as watchdogs while simultaneously representing an array of diverse voices (Christians et al. 2009, Loecherbach and Raeijmaekers 2020).

Commonly, alternative news outlets are defined by whether they criticize established media content or present politically or ideologically radical content and style. Morena Unfortunately, this definition ignores the larger context in which such news sources exist and are consumed.

Numerous studies have sought to explore the characteristics and dynamics of alternative news outlets, from qualitative case studies to quantitative mappings of their sources and framing strategies. Buyens and Van Aelst (2022, in this special issue) have conducted an interesting comparison between left-wing and right-wing alternative media in Belgium to more established mainstream outlets by analysing how they frame and reference news from both within their domain and outside it, such as which actors are aggregated (external actor diversity), quoted directly or given voice within individual news items themselves.

Their findings revealed that alternative news media in general tend to offer more internal actor diversity than mainstream media; yet have lower external actor diversity, with a bias toward elite (especially radical right-wing) actors being featured disproportionately. Furthermore, alternative outlets were more likely to frame the news in an adversarial manner that made its source appear biased or untrustworthy - meaning that despite claims to provide anti-establishment media outlets they actually operate like any other form of establishment media outlets.