alternative news media
Alternative news media is a concept that describes and explains an ideologically diverse array of media activist and journalistic initiatives around the world. While the term has been used to retroactively analyze historical forms of activist reporting, including the abolitionist, labor, and women’s movement presses of the 19th century, it was initially theorized in the latter half of the 20th century. It first became widely used in the 1980s among media scholars and activists interested in explaining or lending coherence to the historical proliferation of underground and left-radical periodicals during the 1960s and 1970s.
Less useful as an ontological category than as a description of a relation, the alternative press is often considered (and its practitioners often consider themselves) vis-a-vis a more dominant or mainstream press. Its conceptual underpinnings are typically rooted in Marxist and post-Marxist theoretical frameworks, often building upon Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony the notion that social and cultural norms, as well as the ideas that are taken as common sense by mainstream journalists, reflect the ideology of a society’s ruling class. While typically associated with left-radical movements, alternative news media is an increasingly salient term in the study of right-wing and modern conservative media, both in the United States and beyond. This entry discusses the origins of the term and theories and practice surrounding alternative media. It concludes by looking at the categorization by some right-wing media as alternative media.
Origins of the Term
There is no settled definition of the term alternative media, which has been variously defined by scholars and activists united by a shared, if expanding, object of analysis. Armstrong conceded that there are considerable differences among alternative media. Most notably, the alternative media he studied employed a variety of funding models and organizational structures, some even relying upon advertising revenues and hierarchical decision-making practices that often contradicted the periodicals editorial advancement of egalitarian and anti-consumerist ideals. This raised the question of exactly how alternative media differ from their mainstream counterparts, a question that has since sparked considerable debate among scholars and activists alike, as we will see below. In A Trumpet to Arms, Armstrong posited a two-way relationship between alternative media and the dominant society. Not only do ideas introduced by alternative media modify society, he wrote, they also are themselves modified in the course of being absorbed by mainstream culture (1981, p. 25). He saw alternative media as a catalyst of social and cultural change, engaged in a struggle against an otherwise obdurate mainstream media over the contours of the prevailing political common sense and interpretations of the news of the day.
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Drawing upon now-classic studies by media sociologists Herbert Gans (Deciding What’s News, 1979) and Todd Gitlin (The Whole World Is Watching, 1980), Armstrong characterized the mainstream press in the United States as upholding small-c conservative political values though not explicitly partisan, the mainstream press was generally supportive of capitalism and U.S. global military dominance, geared toward advancing the status quo interests of political, cultural, and business elites. This analysis was common in an influential strain of progressive media criticism that also emerged in the 1980s, led by journalist Ben Bagdikian and scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. By and large, professional journalists working at commercial outlets in the United States during this time period still adhered to what historian Daniel Hallin has called high modern journalistic values: a commitment to objectivity in reporting and conveying the news in a straightforward, dispassionate tone.
Bagdikian, who wrote the preface to Armstrong’s book, raised doubts about the putative impartiality of the mainstream press in his 1983 book The Media Monopoly. Rekindling structural media criticism first developed by progressive journalists in the 1940s, Bagdikian contended that increasing concentration of media ownership resulted in constraints on journalists’ ability to challenge the status quo. Herman and Chomsky took this a step further in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, arguing that the mainstream media was unwittingly complicit in a propaganda campaign to legitimate capitalism and U.S. imperialism overseas. It was in this context that alternative news media first gained conceptual salience as both a description of real-existing activist journalistic initiatives beyond the control of an increasingly concentrated corporate mass media, and as a normative theory for identifying reporting practices capable of challenging various interlocking systems of oppression.
Another key early study of alternative media was John D. H. Downing’s Radical Media: The Political Experience of Alternative Communication, first published in 1984. Whereas Armstrong had primarily focused on the alternative press (periodicals and radio programming geared toward news and commentary), Downing expanded the conception of alternative media to encompass radical media practices beyond news reporting and analysis from street theater and murals to song and dance. Downing’s study also extended the concept of alternative media geographically, comparing alternative media in the United States with examples in Portugal, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Engaging with anarchist and feminist theories of political organizing and communication, Downing attempted to theorize democratic communication beyond a highly reductive, Cold War era East-West binary. His resulting conception of alternative media was unusually broad and characterized by movement-oriented self-management, autonomy from both corporate and state influences, and a critical disposition toward the powers that be in a given society.
Theories of Alternative Media
If earlier studies of alternative media tended to use critical or left radical content as a basis for distinguishing the alternative press from its mainstream counterparts, media theorists in the early 21st century sought to develop more robust theoretical frameworks for defining and understanding the phenomenon.
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Some, most notably Chris Atton, focus on the modes of production and organizational practices that make alternative media distinct as a form of communication. In Alternative Media, an influential work first published in 2001, Atton contends that content is one among many elements that make particular media projects alternative. Atton suggests defining alternative media according to their ability to generate nonstandard and subversive methods of creation, production, and distribution. Media that rely upon advertising revenues or hierarchical decision-making would not count as alternatives, according to this view. Atton also extends the conception of production to include audiences, arguing that among alternative media’s unique traits is their ability to offer a means of democratic communication to people who are normally excluded from engaging in media production, that is, they invite and enable audience participation and reflexivity about their relationship to the production process.
Other scholars, most notably Jennifer Rauch, situate alternative media in the eye of the activist beholder. Audience-oriented approaches to understanding alternative media acknowledge that the interpretive strategies used to read, view, or listen to media play a role in distinguishing the alternative from the mainstream. Often audience perceptions of alternative media are less focused on production processes than on content, meaning that even corporate mass media might be considered alternative depending upon a particular audience member’s vantage. While helpful in explaining common vernacular understandings of infotainment programs such as The Daily Show (1996–present) or the cable channel Fox News as alternative, audience-oriented approaches complicate clear cut distinctions between alternative and mainstream media.
Still other scholars, such as Leah Lievrouw and Joshua Atkinson, attempt to bridge the production/consumption divide by applying media genre theory. Genres operate according to conventions that structure the content that media makers produce, as well as the assumptions and expectations their audiences have about that media. In her 2011 book, Alternative and Activist New Media, Lievrouw outlined five distinct alternative and activist media genres, based upon their content and functionality: participatory journalism, mediated mobilization, commons knowledge, culture jamming, and alternative computing. The first three of these involve crowd- and audience-sourced newsgathering and circulation methods, as well as mobilization-oriented coverage of events or protests. In his work, Joshua Atkinson has noted that the first three are more applicable to the analysis of alternative (as opposed to activist) media. Building on Lievrouw’s genres, Atkinson defines alternative media as distinct from other media in terms of content (critical or oppositional toward dominant power structures), production (employing participatory sourcing methods), and audience interpretation (as distinct from mainstream media).
Similarly focused on attending to alternative media’s unique methods of production, distribution, and consumption are Olga Bailey, Bart Cammaerts, and Nico Carpentier. Their 2006 book, Understanding Alternative Media draws upon post-structuralist and postmodernist theories to resist essentialist notions of alternative media as somehow inherently noncommercial or radical. They contend that alternative media’s relationship to the mainstream is only one of several relations that shape its historically contingent forms and contents. They offer four interconnected theoretical approaches for understanding the full interventions of alternative media in a given society. First, they argue that alternative media serve communities, opening channels of communication for misrepresented, stigmatized, or repressed social groups with the goal of validating and empowering them. Second, they argue that alternative media are engaged in counter-hegemonic discursive struggles with the mainstream media over what constitutes common sense, erring on the side of self-representation for those excluded in conventional media narratives. Third, they see alternative media as providing a crucial link to civil society, offering a pathway for political participation previously unavailable to marginalized groups. Lastly, they theorize alternative media as a rhizome, by which they mean that alternative media serve to link otherwise distinct democratic struggles, enabling new forms of political identity and solidarity to emerge.
Another, more recent, approach that similarly disrupts essentialist or fixed notions of alternative media is Linda Jean Kenix’s continuum model. Kenix argues against thinking of alternative media as conceptually distinct from mainstream media. She theorizes the relationship between alternative and mainstream media not as a binary, but as a spectrum. While acknowledging important differences between alternative and mainstream news media outlets in terms of individual motivations, organizational practices, media ownership, and ideological influences Kenix points to shared norms and routines among alternative and mainstream journalists as well as the shared commercial pressures of sustaining a news outlet in a capitalist economy. These similarities result in a convergence among both mainstream and alternative media toward news practices that emphasize social networking and individual empowerment values that were once more common among the alternative than the mainstream.
While scholars have taken pains to theorize the alternative press how and why it functions as a social and cultural change agent, its capacity for counter-hegemonic struggle, its coproduction between alternative journalists and their audiences, its differences from the mainstream news media they have often had practical case studies in mind while doing so. Activists themselves have shaped the meaning of the alternative press through praxis.
Alternative Media Praxis
There is a long history of journalistic endeavors, both in the United States and globally, that fit the alternative media mold, but precede it conceptually. Many political movements of world historical proportions from the transnational struggle to abolish slavery to early feminist campaigns for suffrage and gender equality were rooted in robust print cultures, with myriad periodicals designed to give voice to communities who were not at the time considered to be capable of full human agency or political citizenship. The reporters and commentators associated with these movements, as well as the socialist, anarchist, and labor presses that advocated for the concerns and rights of workers around the turn of the 20th century, were typically self-published or published by movement or party-aligned periodicals building what theorist Nancy Fraser has termed counter-publics, capable of developing oppositional or alternative discourses and framings of the news of the day in an effort to shift broader public sentiments. These radical print cultures persisted well into the 20th century, although they were variously impeded by periods of political repression. From the late 1940s onward, they were joined over the airwaves by the Pacifica radio network, which operates noncommercial, listener-supported radio stations known for airing progressive interpretations of the news of the day.
As noted earlier, the term alternative media was initially coined to explain the proliferation of underground newspapers and other radical periodicals associated with the global New Left and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. During those decades, youth movements emerged in countries around the world, aligning with popular and working-class struggles against racism, colonialism, and war. These movements not only advanced radical (often Marxist or anarchist) social and political visions but also pushed for looser cultural norms around drug use, sexuality, and gender performance. They gave rise to hundreds of underground newspapers, whose role was not only to chronicle the movements but to give voice to a wide array of marginalized social groups with whom the movements were aligned politically and culturally.
By the end of the 1960s, approximately 500 underground newspapers were being published (most weekly or intermittently) in the United States alone, with most major cities laying claim to at least one. Among the first were the Los Angeles Free Press, or Freep, which began publication in 1964, and the Berkeley Barb, a particularly influential paper founded in 1965. At its peak in 1968, the Barb had a weekly circulation of 90,000. Both papers were among the early underground newspapers that helped form the Underground Press Syndicate in 1966, a network that expanded rapidly over the following years and enabled local papers to share reporting, commentary, and cultural material across the United States. Similar underground newspapers emerged in countries throughout the world, among them the Black Dwarf in the United Kingdom, Sydney OZ in Australia, and Actuel in France.
In the United States and Canada, many of these underground newspapers disappeared by the late 1970s and 1980s, as do-it-yourself punk and anarchist subcultures turned away from newspapers toward the production of zines. Those alternative newspapers that remained, most notably New York’s Village Voice (which, founded in 1955, both preceded and outlasted its New Left underground counterparts) adapted to compete within their local commercial media markets relying upon classified advertising revenues, and selling ad space to businesses deemed too unseemly by more mass audience daily newspapers (e.g., sex workers, night clubs, and drinking establishments). From the 1960s through the early 21st century, when they were starved of revenue as classified advertising migrated to free online platforms, alt-weekly newspapers could be found in most major U.S. cities, where they served as sites of journalistic innovation specializing in critical arts and culture reporting, as well as more subjective, literary long-form pieces characteristic of New Journalism, and deep-dive investigative reporting into social and political issues of both local and national concern. By the end of the 20th century, these periodicals largely maintained their countercultural edginess but moderated somewhat politically. Still mostly liberal or progressive, few advanced the radical political visions of their underground predecessors.The turn of the 21st century saw the emergence of a global justice movement, opposing the transnational expansion of corporate power enabled by international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Initially sustained by underground newspapers, zines, and radical (often anarchist and/or feminist) publishers and info shops, the movement also benefited from widespread adoption of the Internet, which resulted in a flourishing of both digital and analog activist media projects around the world. Most notable was the Independent Media Center, or Indymedia, a network of activist journalist collectives launched in Seattle in 1999. The early 2000s saw the rise of networked local collectives in cities and college towns around the world staffed by volunteers. The Indymedia network covered protests around the globe and amplified the local impacts of corporate globalization. By the middle aughts, the Indymedia network included more than 150 collectives across the Americas, Western Europe, and Oceania.
While Indymedia declined in the 2010s, its model of radical participatory online media evolved and persisted with the rise of social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. While not radical or alternative in their own right, activists have nevertheless used these for-profit, corporate-owned omnibus platforms to report and widely disseminate news and commentary that would have been traditionally relegated to a localized underground press or online activist sites. In 2011, the Canadian alternative magazine Adbusters founded in 1989, and known for innovations in anti-consumerist culture jamming put out a call for activists to Occupy Wall Street, which New York-based activists heeded that September. What became known as the Occupy movement borrowed social media reporting practices, most notably livestreaming, from Arab Spring activists who had leveraged online media tools to promote democracy movements throughout North Africa and the Middle East earlier that year.
While the Occupy movement dissipated under police pressure, its grassroots participatory practices of news production and circulation have become a regular feature of new social movements in the 21st century. Bolstered by widespread popular adoption of cell phones with high quality camera and video functionality, as well as high-speed mobile broadband, the Black Lives Matter movement in particular reinvigorated longstanding struggles for Black freedom and against police brutality by documenting and widely disseminating evidence of police misconduct and murder of African Americans. As such, the alternative press has become less often associated with particular mediums or outlets, but remains robust in the highly participatory practices of ideologically driven social media reporting.
News on the Right
While most predominating theories and histories of alternative news media tend to focus on outlets and practices associated with left radical and other liberatory movements, the media activists associated with the modern conservative movement or New Right have long viewed their work through an alternative media lens. From its earliest iterations in the early 1950s, the modern conservative movement in the United States pitted itself against a dominant liberal media. Understanding the mainstream news media to be biased against conservative ideas and interpretations of the news helped motivate media activists from William F. Buckley to Phyllis Schlafly to Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich to launch various conservative newsletters, magazines, direct mail campaigns, and even an upstart cable television channel. While more focused on commentary than reporting, these early movement-oriented right-wing media nevertheless framed the news for a growing audience of conservatives in the United States.
Initially funded by wealthy donors, by the late 1980s conservative media began showing signs of commercial viability in the United States. In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission revoked its fairness doctrine, which since 1949 had mandated balanced coverage of politically contentious issues over the airwaves, creating space for conservative talk radio innovators such as Rush Limbaugh. Throughout the 1990s, talk radio provided a crucial alternative medium for disseminating conservative interpretations of the news of the day in a format that invited the participation of audiences, who were encouraged to call in to express their views. By 1996, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes capitalized on the active conservative news audience fostered by talk radio hosts, launching the Fox News cable channel with the promise of providing the fair and balanced reporting that conservatives felt was missing from the mainstream media.
Talk radio and Fox News would continue to dominate the right-wing alternative media sphere in the United States, but the early 21st century saw a flourishing of alternative news sites on the right globally. In the United States, Andrew Breitbart launched Breitbart in 2007 with the goal of making it the Huffington Post of the right, referring to a then-popular liberal news aggregation and commentary site. Breitbart made a name for itself during the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, breaking a series of dubiously reported stories and circulating selectively edited video clips that mixed culture jamming tactics with investigative reporting aesthetics. The site would shift further rightward upon the death of its founder in 2012, and under the leadership of Steve Bannon it played a leading role in promoting the Republican candidacy of Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016. As of 2020, it remained among the most influential of an array of online conservative news ventures, including the Daily Caller, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Free Beacon, and TheBlaze, among others. Similar sites have also emerged across the globe, stoking resurgent right-wing nationalist movements throughout Europe as well as in Brazil and India. Sites such as Fria Tider in Sweden, Junge Freiheit in Germany, and Réinformation TV in France have provided alternative news sources for right-wing audiences frustrated by putative left bias in mainstream outlets. Like their left counterparts, right-wing activists have also taken to social media platforms, linking and sharing original content on omnibus platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as well as more niche discussion boards like 4chan and 8chan.
While conservative direct mail pioneer and magazine publisher Richard Viguerie has long framed conservative media activism in the United States as alternative media, scholars have been slow to employ alternative media frameworks for explaining right-wing media. By 2019 that had changed, with scholars calling for more robust and interdisciplinary inquiries into the dynamics of conservative news cultures, resulting from consistent patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among the sites of production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news in the United States, and more attention to the transnational similarities in how right-wing alternative media mobilize nationalist politics.
By 2020, high-choice media environments, combined with political economic headwinds facing mainstream news outlets, have increased the salience of alternative media around the world, while simultaneously disrupting the alternative/mainstream binary that has traditionally lent it conceptual utility. Some scholars have suggested hyperpartisan news as a conceptual replacement for alternative news media, but it remains to be seen whether it will attract the same degree of scholarly and activist buy-in.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.