Hyperpartisan news: Rethinking the media for populist politics

Abstract

Online media sites such as Breitbart News in the United States and The Canary in the United Kingdom have come to prominence as powerful new agents. Their reach and influence in the contemporary digital media ecology have been widely highlighted, yet there has been little scholarship to situate these important new players in the field of political communication. This article argues that, first, these ‘interlopers’ known as the ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-left’ need to be understood as embedded in the context of populist politics. Second, ‘hyperpartisan’ describes these sites better than the framework of alternative media as it mirrors populism’s ideological pillar of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Finally, a deliberate provocation is argued to name these digital start-ups as news to create a starting point for conceptualising these disruptive new media forces.

Pseudo-Media Sites, Polarization, and Pandemic Skepticism in Spain

“…Euskalnews completes this approach with two common obsessions of far-right wing media, such as vaccines (Douglas, 2021) and migration (Rone, 2020), even if its connection to the coronavirus is tangential. In all cases, one can clearly identify the pattern of a populist (Muller and Schulz, 2021;Rae, 2020) and polarized discourse (Stroud, 2010), aligned with far-right ideology.…”

Why National Media Systems Matter: A Longitudinal Analysis of How UK Left-Wing and Right-Wing Alternative Media Critique Mainstream Media (2015–2018)

“…But a more inclusive conceptualisation of alternative media has been resisted because of the particular characteristics of new left-wing and right-wing alternative mediaincluding sites such as The Canary and Breitbart-that champion a highly partisan agenda and vehemently oppose mainstream media (Rae 2020). Their rise has been connected with the more populist political environment of recent years (Fenton 2018), which, in turn, has created a new media environment that privileges a hyperpartisan reporting style and form.…”

“…Their rise has been connected with the more populist political environment of recent years (Fenton 2018), which, in turn, has created a new media environment that privileges a hyperpartisan reporting style and form. According to Rae (2020), hyperpartisan news represents a personalisation (bias towards a political leader); bad manners, emotionalisation and simplification (transgressive style); polarisation (shuns objectivity and facts to be overtly partisan), intensification (the elevation of partisan journalism to a 'hyper' extreme) and anti-establishment (openly hostile towards mainstream media and political parties while appealing directly to the 'people' as content consumers and distributors through social media).…”

Separated by a common language: How Breitbart and The New York Times produce different meanings from common words

“…NYT is a highly influential, mainstream, legacy newspaper that leans moderately liberal (left) on the standard liberal-conservative spectrum (Budak et al, 2016). Breitbart.com, founded in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart and taken over by Steve Bannon in 2012, exemplifies a 'hyperpartisan' (Rae, 2021) form of polemical right-wing news, establishing itself as a 'a rallying point for the 'alt-right', a loosely constructed 'movement' that brings together white supremacism, anti-feminism, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic extremism' (Davis, 2019: 244, citing Posner, 2016.…”