74 Zombie Media
by the Standing Committee of Correspondents. As with so many of the
Trump administration’s activities in the first six months, heat generated
by an apparent willingness to break with standard conventions was often frustrated by other checks and balances, but the admission of such
figures was an indication that Trump had often looked to alternative
sources of news to report on him favourably during and after the election, most notably Breitbart, whose executive chair, Steve Bannon, was
appointed by Trump as the White House Chief Strategist.
Rather like the term “fake news”, alt-journalism is a phenomenon that
has a much longer history before coalescing into a particular form associated with online commentary and reporting from a typically rightwing, even far right, bias. The ease with which individuals could set up
news sites (if not necessarily attract attention and readership) was evident
since the launch of the Drudge Report in 1995, aggregating news with a
conservative bias during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Cernovich’s own
website, Danger and Play, had effectively begun life as a men’s rights
blog before including political commentary, and since the end of the
1990s, the news reporting landscape has shifted from a more highly
centralised cluster of print publishers and broadcasters into a much more
diverse, even chaotic, scattering of blogs, alternative news services, and
social media feeds – a few of them, such as Donald Trump’s own Twitter
account – sometimes reaching an audience of millions.
Yet while the technological means for disseminating information to
phones and computers worldwide was different, this breaking of the monopoly of mainstream media illustrated that the monopoly itself was
in many respects a historical anomaly. As historians such as Conboy,
Curran and Seaton, and Chapman have frequently observed, many of
the earliest broadsheets emerged as something closer in status to that
of an underground press, unloved and unwanted by those in authority.
5
The metamorphosis of the Fourth Estate into the mainstream media,
part of that “structural transformation” of the public sphere into part
of the public relations and communications infrastructure that is frequently neglected by journalists who prefer to think of themselves as the
watchdogs of the state, had led to a demand for alternatives since the
1960s at least, and not simply restricted to the Soviet bloc. In the 1970s,
observers such as Roger Lewis and Robert Glessing were reporting on
countercultural and clandestine publications such as The Los Angeles
Free Press and the Liberation News Service, providing coverage of events
which were neglected by the main outlets.
6
Such alternative sources were
generally part of the New Left and suffered in that movement’s general
decline following the end of the Cold War, but by the early 2000s, the
possibilities offered by the Internet offered the potential for new forms of
alternative journalism. As Chris Atton, John Downing, and Clemencia
Rodriguez argued, the emergence of amateur media producers coincided
with the simplification of distribution online to create a new category of
by the Standing Committee of Correspondents. As with so many of the
Trump administration’s activities in the first six months, heat generated
by an apparent willingness to break with standard conventions was often frustrated by other checks and balances, but the admission of such
figures was an indication that Trump had often looked to alternative
sources of news to report on him favourably during and after the election, most notably Breitbart, whose executive chair, Steve Bannon, was
appointed by Trump as the White House Chief Strategist.
Rather like the term “fake news”, alt-journalism is a phenomenon that
has a much longer history before coalescing into a particular form associated with online commentary and reporting from a typically rightwing, even far right, bias. The ease with which individuals could set up
news sites (if not necessarily attract attention and readership) was evident
since the launch of the Drudge Report in 1995, aggregating news with a
conservative bias during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Cernovich’s own
website, Danger and Play, had effectively begun life as a men’s rights
blog before including political commentary, and since the end of the
1990s, the news reporting landscape has shifted from a more highly
centralised cluster of print publishers and broadcasters into a much more
diverse, even chaotic, scattering of blogs, alternative news services, and
social media feeds – a few of them, such as Donald Trump’s own Twitter
account – sometimes reaching an audience of millions.
Yet while the technological means for disseminating information to
phones and computers worldwide was different, this breaking of the monopoly of mainstream media illustrated that the monopoly itself was
in many respects a historical anomaly. As historians such as Conboy,
Curran and Seaton, and Chapman have frequently observed, many of
the earliest broadsheets emerged as something closer in status to that
of an underground press, unloved and unwanted by those in authority.
5
The metamorphosis of the Fourth Estate into the mainstream media,
part of that “structural transformation” of the public sphere into part
of the public relations and communications infrastructure that is frequently neglected by journalists who prefer to think of themselves as the
watchdogs of the state, had led to a demand for alternatives since the
1960s at least, and not simply restricted to the Soviet bloc. In the 1970s,
observers such as Roger Lewis and Robert Glessing were reporting on
countercultural and clandestine publications such as The Los Angeles
Free Press and the Liberation News Service, providing coverage of events
which were neglected by the main outlets.
6
Such alternative sources were
generally part of the New Left and suffered in that movement’s general
decline following the end of the Cold War, but by the early 2000s, the
possibilities offered by the Internet offered the potential for new forms of
alternative journalism. As Chris Atton, John Downing, and Clemencia
Rodriguez argued, the emergence of amateur media producers coincided
with the simplification of distribution online to create a new category of