Looking at it sideways: Alternative media and the activist critique of news

This qualitative, multi-method study investigated how members of two specific news audiences---activists who used alternative media and non-engaged students who relied on mainstream sources---responded to TV journalism using different interpretive strategies and different cultural schemata about "how the media work." In focused group interviews, students and activists alike said they thought producers chose sensational news because it attracted viewers, then claimed that such content did not appeal to them personally---evidence of what communication scholars call "the third-person effect."; Discourse analysis revealed that although both groups distanced their own perspectives from those of an imagined mass audience, they did so in disparate ways. Unlike students, activists played games of interpretation such as role-playing, inventing dialogue, and using conditional clauses contrary to fact ("If ..."). They contrasted their own critical activity with the passive susceptibility they perceived in other people who were not engaged in a counter-public sphere.; The activists also expressed several distinct interpretations of mainstream news that were absent from the students' responses. For instance, the activists rejected market-driven journalism that entertains consumers in favor of a public service model that informs citizens. They attributed the ultimate control of media messages to corporate owners and commercial advertisers rather than to journalists or viewers. And they believed that routine practices such as favoring official sources and representing ordinary people as victims played a subtle role in ideological domination, by supporting the status quo and disempowering the public.; Diary data indicated that the activist informants consumed more alternative news sources than either the student informants or the general U.S. population did. However, the activists also logged a lot of mainstream media usage, in contrast with spoken claims that they didn't really read, watch, or listen to corporate news---suggesting that ritual resistance to "Big Media" served as a marker of collective and individual identity. The oppositional readings reported here are not only active but also activist, in the sense of encouraging participation in social movements and in media production.