Abstract
If you want to read a historically and theoretically grounded volume that also grounds alternative media scholarship in contemporary empirical study and brings you quickly up to date on scholarship and debates within the arena of alternative media studies, Alternative Media Meets Mainstream Politics: Activist Nation Rising is a great book to read.
Edited by Joshua D. Atkinson and Linda Jean Kenix, the volume – which contains 10 empirically grounded chapters by more than a dozen authors, Alternative Media brings into clear view, among other things, debates within media studies about what alternative media are, the complex and fascinating interplay between so-called alternative media and mainstream or traditional media, and a decided empirical, and arguably political and ideological, tilt toward study and investigation of left leaning alternative media over right leaning alternative media.
Each chapter in this volume offers an interesting and unique window in on various dimensions of alternative media with chapters clustered together logically by the editors into several different parts.
To me, the most interesting chapters – and this probably reflects my own biases more than anything – were those that examined, and reflected upon, the ways in which research and scholarship on alternative media has tended to focus heavily on left leaning alt-media as opposed to right leaning alt-media. These chapters are clustered in Part I of the book, which is entitled “Entertainment Alternative Media and Political Parties.” For me, one of the key questions that the left bias in scholarship and research on alternative media brings up is: Given the radical differences between many left alternative media and right alternative media – among these, the ways in which left alternative media largely seek to challenge and deconstruct, for example, white dominant norms and racism and the ways in which many alternative right media seek to do exactly the opposite – is it useful, or accurate, to refer to them in one group, collectively, as “alternative media”? That is, ought we perhaps always indicate whether we, as researchers, and as critical scholars, are examining, and talking and writing about, left alternative media or right alternative media rather than referring to both left and right alternative media broadly under the same “keyword” header “alternative media”?
Another key question that these three chapters in particular raised for me: What are some of the potential implications of the empirical, scholarly and ideological and political gaps in terms of a comparative lack of research on right leaning alternative media? For instance, does/would comparative lack of familiarity with alt-right media make it easier for right-leaning alternative media to triumph in the public arena because, in escaping empirical investigation, they might also escape critical political and theoretical interrogation that could serve to, at least in part indirectly blunt their social, political and ideological effects on American, and global, societies? The fact that this volume brings together research on both left-wing and right-wing alternative media is a bonus, as it allows for scholars, and others, interested in alternative media to be able to both learn more, and compare more easily and clearly, about alt-left and alt-right media. Other key strands and questions that weave their way throughout Alternative media include:
To what extent have alternative media changed the media landscape in the United States, and globally, especially in terms of how so-called mainstream media cover the world? To what extent have alternative media helped to alter the political landscape and political discourse in the United States – and beyond – and for “better” and/or for “worse”?
Alternative media splits up 10 chapters into three parts with an introduction by Atkinson and a stand-alone chapter following the introduction meant at least in part to establish key ideas and keywords and concepts, Chapter 1, “Comparing progressive and conservative audiences for alternative media and their attitudes towards journalism,” by Jennifer Rauch leading the way into the three thematic sections of the book which cluster three, and sometimes four, chapters together.
Chapter 1, “Comparing progressive and conservative audiences for alternative media and their attitudes toward journalism” by Jennifer Rauch, opens by immediately drawing attention to a scholarly and research gap on right leaning alternative media. Rauch notes that, “The surge in far-right media activism that helped bring Trump to power likely marks the definitive emergence of alternative media that had previously been overlooked or deemed inconsequential to public discourse” (p. 19). Rauch also rightly questions the utility of a general category of “alternative media.” She notes that, “Given current trends toward public polarization, radicalization, and fragmentation, it remains to be seen whether alternative and mainstream will remain useful categories or evolve into simply left-wing and right-wing media” (p. 34).
Chapter 2, “No More ideological gatekeepers?” – which stands as the first of three chapters in “Part I: Entertainment Alternative Media and Political Parties” – continues the interesting look at alt-right media. Authors Prashanth Bhat and Krishnan Vasudevan examine a revealing and fascinating “war” of sorts between a traditional alt-right media outlet, National Review, and a non-traditional/Internet/Social Media-age alt right media outlet, Breitbart. Their analysis of more than a hundred National Review and Breitbart pieces published between January 2016 and the November 2016 election of Donald Trump empirically verifies and confirms what many already would have surmised: Breitbart tries to wrap itself up in rightist populism and use this base to deconstruct and take down the “old guard” of more traditional, intellectual conservatism, a la the National Review. It is interesting to think about what a similar comparative analysis might reveal today. That is, in what ways, if any, might National Review have pivoted toward – or further away? – from Breitbart after four years of Trump?
Chapter 3, “Narrowmobilization and Tea Party activism” by book co-editor Joshua D. Atkinson and Suzanne Berg, zeroes in on so-called “narrowmobilization,” or the process by which activists seek to hold politicians up to a “purity test” in terms of their political views, orientations and policies, a technique Atkinson and Berg ascribe primarily to alt-right media and groups. Atkinson and Berg also focus on “mesomobolization,” a process whereby different left-wing groups coordinate together for a common cause, but ultimately tend to drift apart, they charge, due to what they call “strategic agonisms”. One of the key implications of this chapter seems to be that alt-right groups and activists are often likely to be more successful than alt-left groups and activists in achieving their goals because, according to Atkinson and Berg, more focus = more success.
Chapter 4, “Activist speak at the Republican debates” by co-editor Joshua D. Atkinson, Nina Gjoci, Robert Joseph, Emi Kanemoto, and Tao Zhang, searches for connections between alt-right media content and mainstream political discourse, with the aim of seeing how, when, why and in what different ways alt-right media content gets taken up in contexts such as mainstream political debates. The authors look for connections between content in the right-wing alternative media RedState, Tea Party Express and The Rush Limbaugh Show and political discussions and talk during some of the 2015 Republican Presidential debates. The researchers do, in fact, find that alt-right media influences mainstream political discourse in this particular instance. Their analysis had me wondering: What might a comparative analysis of alt-left media and Democratic debates and alt-right media and its influence on Republican debates reveal?
Chapters 5 through 8 form “Part II: Entertainment Alternative Media and Mainstream Political News.” Chapter 5, “Alternative press coverage of the 2016 Election” by Chad Painter and Madison Olinger, takes a close look at how various Ohio-based alternative media covered the Democratic primary and local politics. Plugging into (2009) Christians et al. Normative Theories of the Media, they examine content in four Ohio alternative media publications for evidence of the different roles typically assigned to alternative media as these are laid out by Christians et al., namely a “radical”, “monitorial”, “facilitative” and “collaborative” role. Painter and Olinger conclude that both alternative media and mainstream media play multiple roles at once.
Chapter 6, “Satirical news as alternative journalism” by Kevin Howley, uses a case study of the NPR satiric comedic news program Le Show to illustrate the ways in which alternative media and satirical media overlap. In particular, it makes a very strong case for those who study alternative media to pay more empirical, scholarly and theoretical attention to satirical news shows such as Le Show, The Daily Show, etc. Some of the similarities between political satire and alternative journalism, concludes Howley, are strong tendencies for both forms to challenge conventional journalism, to facilitate democratic deliberation and to promote civic engagement.
Chapter 7, “Mainstream coverage of alternative media” by Linus Andersson, takes us out of the United States – for the most part, the book focuses on alternative media in the United States – to Sweden. Andersson’s chapter adds to the volume in multiple ways: By helping to internationalize its empirical net, by shedding light on alternative media in Sweden and, more specifically, by unearthing a very interesting Swedish phenomenon which has seen alternative media come to mostly mean right-leaning alternative media in Sweden rather than left-leaning alt-media.
Volume co-editor Linda Jean Kenix continues the focus on alternative media outside of the United States in Chapter 8, “Alternative media and journalistic boundary work,” by focusing on discursive battles between traditional journalists and bloggers over who is, and is not, considered to be a “real” journalist in New Zealand.
The final two chapters of the book, grouped together in a section called “Part III: Participatory Alternative Media and Emancipatory Possibilities,” provide a closer look at more interactive social media located alternative media. In Chapter 9, Nune Grigoryan and Wolfgang Suetzl analyze the now heavily YouTube-based Young Turks Network, a left-leaning alternative news media organization, and Laura A. Stengrim and G. Brandon Knight take an in-depth look at an alt-left interactive online space based at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana. Grigoryan and Suetzl do an excellent job of laying out the historical development of, and rise of, The Young Turks Network and of showing us the important role that the network has played in the emergence of an alternative media that captures, engages, and allows younger audiences to be more than passive consumers of news and information. Finally, in Chapter 10, Stengrim and Knight conclude that the University of Illinois online space they analyze operates effectively as a so-called “intermezzo” space, helping to suture the global dimensions of the alt-left political movement onto local, concrete, specific instances and stories that ground the macro in the micro.
Overall, Alternative Media Meets Mainstream Politics: Activist Nation Rising provides a useful, informative and revealing empirical and contemporary historical overview of the state of alternative media, especially in the United States. It offers an interesting window in as well on how alternative media connect to, relate to, cover, and intersect with dominant and mainstream politics and news media in the United States – and beyond.
