How Alternative Are Alternative Media? Analyzing Speaker and Topic Diversity in Mainstream and Alternative Online Outlets
Open Access
- 23 September 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Digital Journalism
Abstract
Alternative outlets can differ in their degree of partisanship, activism, and their opposition to a perceived news “mainstream.” We expect this could lead to diverging contributions to overall news diversity. We assess how mainstream-like, partisan and activist media differ from mainstream reporting concerning migration and refugee policy in Germany. We combine a manual analysis of speaker diversity in 12 mainstream and alternative outlets (N = 1,172 articles) with a computational topic model (N = 34,819 articles) covering 30 outlets to assess topic diversity. Interestingly, we find no significant differences between mainstream and alternative outlets regarding overall speaker diversity. But our data show differences in which parties get cited, and whether outlets focus on experts, civil society speakers, or migrants themselves. While mainstream media offer higher overall topic diversity, alternative media split along the lines of agenda accommodation and more independent agendas of partisan and activist media.Keywords
This publication has 50 references indexed in Scilit:
- Real World is Not Enough: The Media as an Additional Source of Negative Attitudes Toward Immigration, Comparing Denmark and the NetherlandsEuropean Sociological Review, 2014
- Exploring the Alternative-Mainstream Dialectic: What “Alternative Media” Means to a Hybrid AudienceCommunication, Culture & Critique, 2014
- Sources in the NewsJournalism Studies, 2013
- Measuring Concentration of Media Ownership: 1976–2009International Journal on Media Management, 2013
- Political Information Opportunities in EuropeThe International Journal of Press/Politics, 2012
- Tuning out the World of News and Current Affairs--An Empirical Study of Europe's Disconnected CitizensEuropean Sociological Review, 2010
- What makes news more multiperspectival? A field analysisPoetics, 2009
- “I'm Doing this to Change the World”: journalism in alternative and mainstream mediaJournalism Studies, 2005
- The Conceptualization and Measurement of DiversityCommunication Research, 2003
- Neue Begründung der Theorie quadratischer Formen von unendlichvielen Veränderlichen.Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik (Crelles Journal), 1909