The question of truth receives much societal attention today: fake news, alternative facts and conspiracy theories seem everywhere. These discussions have only gained urgency during the corona pandemic. The contemporary media landscape plays an important role in the rise and spread of these alternative forms of knowledge, but how is largely unknown. Wishing to delve deeper than current media hypes and moral panics allow for, I have ethnographically studied the role of media in the everyday life of conspiracy theorists (CT) from a cultural sociological perspective. To study what media sources (TVchannels, newspapers, internet sites, blogs, Facebook pages/groups, etc) CTs use and why, I asked them to keep a “media diary” for two weeks and reflect on that in a follow-up interview. To study how CT’s read (interpret, appropriate and authenticate) media contents, I conducted photo/video elicitation interviews. This illuminates the way people engage with media (technologies) in an era of information overload. Such insights are valuable not just for scholars interested in the topic itself, but speak more broadly to professionals in the field (e.g. journalists, policy makers, government officials, scientists, NGO’s and politicians) who have to deal with the broader distrust of official knowledge in Western European societies.
Due to the corona pandemic, no ethnographic accounts where I would be studying the online behaviour of CTs at their own homes were possible. Instead, I had to organize online meetings, most notably in the form of skype interviews in which I asked more about their media behaviour. I could and have made use of the research method of media diaries to probe their online media consumption, most of my respondents filled this in. The first main finding is that most CTs use a wide variety of news sources: from small independent news outlets, to conspiratorial blogs and newly emerging YouTube channels, but also the more mainstream public news outlets. However, the alternative media outlets that sprung up in the last years are mostly followed to get information that does not appear in the mainstream. Reasons for following these alternative channels is not merely (or at all) that mainstream media is distrusted, but more that these channels provide alternative and complementary perspectives on mainstream news. As such, respondents argue, they add to a fuller perspective of what is going on in the world.
The second main finding is that CTs actually do consult the “mainstream media” they often so much despise. More than not, these people are aware of most societal discussions, and stay up-to-date by following mainstream, and mostly public service media. However, differently from most audiences who interpret the mainstream media for its substantive contents, CTs consult mainstream media for different reasons. The most prominent reason was to remain up-to-date about how topics of concern are portrayed in the mass-media and how “the majority of society” thinks about contemporary issues.
Thirdly, the corona pandemic forced me to shift focus from the concrete media consumption behavior that I could observe at home, to their experiences and understandings of the role of the media during this public health crisis. Based on interviews with 23 CTs during the pandemic, I explain how they have come to distrust the official narrative as present in most media, government and science communication. Respondents argue that their suspicion began because most governments acted in unique accordance with each other, because only one way out of the crisis was presented by public health authorities and science advisory committees, and because most media did not present a variety of perspectives on how to deal with the crisis, but uniformly initiated a media panic highlighting the dangers of the virus/pandemic, and legitimizing government policies. Because media, science and politics were so much aligned in their framing of the problem and in the formulation of solutions, suspicions arose whether this did not indicate a (global) conspiracy.
