Research
Against the Firewall: Dialectic Transmediations and Political World-Building in Right-Wing Alternative Media
In my thesis project, I dissect the American political news media ecosystem during the first 100 days of the second Donald Trump term to explore how the dynamic interplay between new and old media logics and the shifting boundaries between mainstream and alternative media mutually shape contemporary media production and consumption — particularly in relation to the growing distrust of media as an institution. The rise of far-right extremism in Western societies has prompted initiatives to build regulatory and institutional firewalls to protect liberal political discourse. I will investigate how the mainstream political news media actualizes such strategies through intermedial reflexivity (Szczepanik, 2002), representing and reconditioning themselves through the representation of another qualified medium. Further, I will ask how these practices influence the polarizing narratives that are the pillars of political world-building in alternative news media. The focal point of the study will be the interplay between Steve Bannon’s War Room, a right-wing alternative news podcast, and the current configuration of mainstream political news media. With the aid of Elleström’s model of media modalities and media types (2021), Chadwick’s hybrid media system theory (2017), Barad’s relational ontology (2003), and Arendt’s concept of political world-making (2010), I will examine how alternative political world-building is dialectically transmediated within the political news media ecosystem, ultimately pondering to what extent this process transforms media practices and power relations by altering the logics of both alternative and mainstream news media.