They won't get fooled (again)? Exploring consumption of and trust to "alternative" online news media in the Czech Republic
Abstract
Digitalization of media environment in recent years has brought the rise and proliferation of new, Internet-based media outlets, challenging the position of traditional or mainstream news organizations. While some of these new players on the media market conform to professional journalistic norms, others do not feel bound by the standards of the profession and frequently engage in manufacturing and spreading disinformation, hoaxes and "fake news".
The negative impact of such alternative news production, multiplied in the environment of social networking sites, on democracy and the public sphere have been recently subject to extensive debates; yet relatively little is still known about the audiences of these outlets, the patterns of and motivations for their use, as well as about their attitudes to media and politics. Utilizing data from the 2017 Digital News Report survey (N=2003, 18+), this paper aims to fill this gap and explore factors influencing "alternative" news consumption by the Internet users in the Czech Republic, focusing particularly on the consumers of those online news outlets that are generally regarded as hotbeds of disinformation and "fake news", composing broadly 15% of the sample.
Apart from socio-demographic characteristics, the analysis examines the extent to which these audiences differ from consumers of mainstream / legacy media brands in terms of their political knowledge and attitudes, online participation, as well as the level of trust to media in the country and the perceived level of their autonomy - a variable particularly significant in the context of the ongoing process of oligarchization of the Czech media landscape.