Alternative Media from the Perspective of Journalism Students

In recent years, several trends can be seen in the media environment: a massive expansion of the range of information sources, fragmentation of the audience, a paradigm shift in access to and search for information, and the rise of so-called alternative media. Although alternative media is not a new trend, the emergence of social networks, the ease of creating, disseminating and sharing media content, together with factors such as the polarisation of society and the crisis of trust in institutions, are contributing to the changing landscape of alternative media. The literature review shows the fluctuation of meaning, the instability of the term. In scholarly texts we find references to alternative media as community media, radical media, critical media, with the common denominator being the presentation of topics and opinions that are not sufficiently presented in the traditional media. In the Slovak media environment, alternative media are mostly perceived as those through which disinformation, conspiracies and hate speech are spread. The study presents the results of qualitative research focused on journalism students and their attitudes towards alternative media. The aim was to find out how they perceive alternative media in relation to traditional media and the spread of misinformation. The research is based on in-depth interviews with eight first-year students of the journalism study programme. The interviews show that the perception of alternative media is not uniform. On the one hand, they are perceived as a space for opinions that do not get attention in the mainstream media, on the other hand, they are also perceived as disseminators of misinformation. Despite the impossibility of generalisation, it is interesting to note that the respondents have no experience of systematic media education addressing verifying information and media credibility.