Project Details
Projekt
(No) alternative? Factors influencing the construction of populism in alternative political online media.
Subject Area
Communication Sciences
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523912777
The number and variety of information offerings on the Internet have increased enormously in recent years. At the same time, media usage has changed and differentiated. Online content from established media is still frequently used. However, alternative political online media (APOM) are also being used to supplement or replace established media. While there are already initial findings on the use of APOM and users' characteristics, we need to learn more about the content of APOM and its context of emergence. Due to this research deficit, in this project, we first examine the content of APOM in an automated content analysis compared to established media. The initial question of the project is the extent and nature of populism in APOM. As possible explanations of populism in APOM, we consider various factors and levels of influence. First, we explain populism regarding the degree of professional competencies and individual role conceptions of news producers. Second, we draw on news routines and news values as explanations. Third, we are interested in users' news preferences and underlying political motives and attitudes. Fourth, we incorporate the socio-technical affordances of social media platforms. We implement the project in three sub-studies. In the first sub-study, we examine German-language APOM compared to high-reach established online media in Germany in large-scale automated content analysis. In this analysis, we target original posts from news websites and posts on the social media platforms YouTube and Twitter. We carefully validate the research instruments through manual content analyses. In the second sub-study, we qualitatively survey APOM producers about their perceived news routines, role attitudes, professional background, and populist attitudes. We validate these statements by manual content analyses of their published articles. In the third sub-study, we survey APOM users on their media repertoire used, their participation in APOM, political motives for their participation, topic preferences, and populist attitudes. Further, a manual content analysis examines the published comments of the active APOM user community on the extent and nature of populism and on the political motives of participation that are publicly visible in the content. We synthesize the results of the three sub-studies into an overall model. The project results are scientifically relevant for situating newer APOM in the context of the media system. In addition, we can evaluate the extent to which they contribute to a democratic expansion of discourse. The results provide journalists and policymakers insight into how APOM presents its content and the role producers and users play in the process.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
