The Mainstream is Fake: Media Criticism and Mistrust from the Radical Right

Questions of trust, authority and legitimacy in the public sphere are of pivotal concern in any given democratic society. Today, such dimensions are increasingly challenged by actors, organizations and online media positioned right of the mainstream centre-right, sharing a deep skepticism towards immigration policies and a fundamental mistrust in the mainstream media (Holt, 2016; Thorbjørnsrud, forthcoming 2017). Radical right actors have traditionally been assessed as illegitimate by the mainstream media and have thus largely been excluded from mediated debates (Figenschou & Thorbjørnsrud, 2016). Over the last decades, however, anti-immigration voices ranging from immigration-skeptics, anti-Islamic voices to proponents of extremist Eurabia theories, have established a ‘deviant’, alternative online counter-sphere, actively confronting rather than striving to access mainstream public spheres (Figenschou & Beyer, 2014). The present paper, analyses the media criticism and systematic undermining of mainstream media, carried out by anti-immigration and radical right organizations and alternative media in Norway. In the hybridized current media landscape, anti-immigration and anti-Islamic voices are both more present and more contested in the public sphere than before. In Norway, like in other Nordic media systems, the trust in key societal institutions have traditionally been comparatively high, but recent studies indicate that the levels of trust in journalism and the news media are falling also here (Moe, Thorbjørnsrud, & Fladmoe, forthcoming 2017). Unpacking media mistrust across alternative right sites it conducts a systematic textual analysis of how eight radical right organisations and media with varying levels of deviance relate to the mainstream media (N= 800 articles). It asks: What characterises the radical right media critique; what discourses and evidence do they employ to question or diminish the legitimacy of mainstream media; what alternatives are proposed, and how are such forms of criticism related to debates on immigration, identity and nationhood? The paper argues the need to understand how and why this The analysis contributes to ongoing academic debates on symbolic and social boundaries in the fragmented public spheres (Lamont & Molnár, 2002), the limits of and contestation of legitimate mediated debates (Hallin, 1986) and emerging alternative media (i.e. Atton, 2015).