Conservative Newswork: A Report on the Values and Practices of Online Journalists on the Right (original) (raw)

Comparing Progressive and Conservative Audiences for Alternative Media and Their Attitudes Towards Journalism

Alternative Media Meets Mainstream Politics: Activist Nation Rising (eds. Atkinson and Kenix), 2019

This chapter helps to fill gaps in our knowledge of the relationships among right-wing activists, conservative media, and alternative journalism. The vast majority of research on alternative and activist media, especially in the U.S., has to date assumed a progressive orientation and focused on liberal sources, messages and audiences. By contrast, this paper revisits the literature to illuminate how the field has variously examined and neglected the ideas, practices and publics of right-wing media users. It reports a new analysis of survey data revealing both similarities and divergences between conservative and progressive audiences in regards to their attitudes toward alternative and mainstream media—in particular, toward the individual and structural biases of professional journalism. These findings will help scholars, journalists and other actors to better understand, theorize, and study the role of alternative media users in mainstream political communication. It also suggests several points of departure for future work on alternative journalism, partisan rhetorical strategies, media criticism, and public engagement.

News with Views: Postobjectivism and Emergent Alternative Journalistic Practices in America's Corporate News Media

2013

One of the inchoate yet defining features of journalism in the twenty-first century has been the profession’s unannounced but nonetheless consequential repudiation of the time-honored journalistic ethos of ‘‘objectivity.’’ In this paper, I argue that the gradual renunciation of the ideals of objectivity in contemporary journalistic practice, especially in the United States which birthed the concept, is both a return to journalism’s roots and a back-handed, if profit-inspired, embrace of certain hallmarks of ‘‘alternative journalism,’’ which emerged as a counterfoil to nineteenth-century notions of ‘‘objective journalism.’’ I demonstrate my thesis by historicizing ‘‘objective journalism’’ and linking its emergence to multiple impulses: industrial capitalism’s desire to capture as many eyeballs to consumer goods as possible using the instrumentality of the mass media; the seduction of nineteenth-century positivism, which conduced to the uncritical valorization of epistemic precision, measurability, the ‘‘scientific method,’’ detachment, and other manifestations of naıve empiricism; and the turn-of-of-century delinking of political parties from newspaper business. I also argue that the progressive abandonment of the tenets of ‘‘objective journalism’’ by the legacy media is an artful hegemonic containment of alternative journalism’s age-old ideals and singularities. This, I point out, is actuated by the imperatives of survival in an increasingly uncertain and fragmented media market, made even more so by the unexampled discursive democracy and diversity that the Internet has enabled, which has contributed to the flourishing of citizen and alternative journalism.

Hijacking Journalism: Legitimacy and Metajournalistic Discourse in Right-Wing Podcasts

Media and Communication

Whereas personal expression has become a core practice of journalism whose merits can include greater attention to context and interpretative analysis, these freedoms from the constraints of traditional broadcast conventions can pose serious risks, including the ideological hijacking of journalism by partisan actors. In popular right-wing podcasts, such as those hosted by Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, the element of opinion amplifies the tendency of the podcast medium to relegate news to a secondary concern behind the emotional impact. Not only do podcasters like Shapiro and Bongino contribute to a fractured media environment of hyper-partisan news and commentary, but they also utilize social media platforms and transmedia networks to undermine traditional journalism and replace it with an alternative conservative media ecosystem—a multiplatform, full-service clearinghouse of news and commentary afforded by the publishing capabilities of the internet and the distribution algorithms o...

Journalism Practice (2014): Contest over content: Longitudinal Study of the CNN iReport Effect on the Journalistic Field

This study examines how participatory journalism reshapes the field of journalism in the case of CNN iReport. Participation is conceptualized on a continuum, ranging from participants as providing comments to news stories to participants as constructing news. Using a textual analysis combined with a content analysis of CNN’s broadcast transcripts and articles posted online on CNN.com (N = 668) over a period of six years, this study investigates CNN iReporters’ positions in the organization’s news content as part of its overall news culture. Findings suggest that CNN assigns three major positions to iReporters: commentator, eyewitness, and co-worker. Positions of iReporters vary in story topics and contexts over time. Results show that CNN repositions itself and legitimizes its position as an agenda setter and moderator in relation to citizens’ contributions. In the context of the CNN iReport, participatory journalism as integrated in corporate media content may reinforce the organization’s cultural capital—their independence from external influences—while letting citizens and ultimately free labor be part of news as well as, more recently, sharing with citizens the process of constructing news.

Journalists’ Normative Constructions of Political Viewpoint Diversity

Journalism Studies, 2016

This in-depth interview-based study with US political journalists explores how they conceptualize the portrayal of political viewpoint diversity as a journalistic norm, particularly in light of changes to news and the news media ecology. The political journalists still discursively embrace the normative role of providing audiences with a range of political viewpoints, but express assumptions about democracy that seem to thwart their intentions. The implications for the journalistic field and field theory are considered.

The Liberal Field of Journalism and the Political - The New York Times, Fox News and the Tea Party

This article looks at the challenge posed to the liberal field of journalism by Tea Party populism and Fox News’ attempt to claim the cultural capital of journalism. The Tea Party have defied expectations of a political and rhetorical normalization, declaring liberalism and the New York Times as iredeemable enemies of the populist people. The Times’ coverage of the Tea Party, analyzed in this article, assumes an importance beyond merely covering a political story as it articulates the present state of the field and its understanding of the political. What this author finds is a normative liberal universalist interpretation of the Tea Party movement between the pessimissm of Lippmann or the redemptive humanism of Dewey. The populists are either treated as irrational pseudo- political actors or the credibility of the field is bestowed upon them as the redemptive embodiment of democracy. Neither approach is able to explain populism’s immutable antagonism at an ontological level or the persistence of the Tea Party’s fetishized notion of an America reconciled in private property.

The competing ideals of objectivity and dialogue in American journalism

A B S T R A C T Objectivity and dialogue are competing ideals in the practice of American journalism and in the way the press is analyzed and ethically evaluated. This article examines the relationship of these two ideals using tools from the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber and Michael Bakhtin. I argue that 'objective' journalism is part of an atmosphere that observes, maps, gathers information, and objectifi es social phenomenon while keeping an outsider position and avoiding entrance into dialogical relationships. Such a position demonstrates a monologue that speaks in the ostensibly factual voice of the real world. But as the belief in objectivity waned through the postmodern crisis, the dialogical perception – as a general theoretical and methodological array of thought – started to fl ourish in communication studies and journalistic practices. The undermining process of the modernist objective, message-driven model of communication encouraged the rise of scholarly perceptions and journalistic practices that 'privatized' the communication process into various dialogical sites. Online journalism, with its interactive technological potential, marks another peak in the dialogic potential.