Who gets to define reality?: A Human-AI Roundtable
AK: Media are supposed to be our reality translators. How do they become allergic to unconventional perspectives?
Perplexity: Mainstream news organizations still overwhelmingly rely on official sources—government, corporate, institutional experts—as their default narrators of reality. This isn’t neutral: it embeds institutional interests into “common sense” and marginalizes people whose knowledge comes from lived experience, community organizing, or unconventional research and storytelling methods.
In practice, “newsworthiness” becomes a filter that favors events and voices legible to existing power structures, so anything that doesn’t fit those formats—alternative epistemologies, hybrid genres, experimental narratives—gets coded as advocacy, fringe, or noise rather than evidence.
Objectivity as a gatekeeping device
AK: The cult of “objectivity” was supposed to protect us from propaganda, but it often feels like a loyalty oath to the status quo.
Perplexity: Critical media scholarship has argued for years that objectivity, as practiced, tends to mean “balanced between elite factions” rather than truth-seeking grounded in material conditions and marginalized experience. By over-weighting “both sides” from official institutions, news coverage can systematically erase unconventional voices that don’t fit that binary or that directly challenge the basic frame.
There’s emerging work on “solidarity journalism” that explicitly calls for a different standard: reporting rooted in the dignity and knowledge of communities experiencing harm, and treating their accounts as primary, not as color quotes around official narratives. That model is far more hospitable to unconventional storytellers, but it clashes with institutional habits and branding that still lean on a thin, reputational notion of objectivity.
The invisibility of the unconventional
AK: It’s not only about how the unconventional is covered; often it just isn’t covered at all.
Perplexity: Studies of racial and cultural diversity in news show that marginalized groups are not only underrepresented but stereotyped when they do appear, usually in narrow crime or deficit frames. That erasure extends to unconventional formats and topics: if you don’t already match a recognized “beat,” you are structurally less likely to enter the news agenda in the first place.
Alternative and citizens’ media emerge precisely to fill those gaps, creating platforms where non-dominant identities and unconventional practices can represent themselves. But mainstream institutions often treat these outlets as peripheral or “activist,” which lets them ignore the epistemic challenge they pose to the center’s self-image as the neutral arbiter of reality.
Media power and institutional self‑protection
AK: Media insist they “speak truth to power,” yet they behave like power’s PR department when unconventional challenges show up.
Perplexity: The concept of “media power” highlights that large outlets don’t just report reality; they help construct the social world by deciding which stories and voices count. Because that power is concentrated in a small set of commercial or state-linked institutions, there are strong incentives to maintain relationships with elites and advertisers, which biases coverage toward stability and continuity.
When political or economic upheavals open space for media reform, entrenched interests often push back, and attempts to build more independent, pluralistic media ecosystems face stagnation or regression. In that environment, unconventional journalists become risky: they threaten relationships, branding, and the fiction that the institution is above the fray.
Alternative media as counter‑infrastructure
AK: So the unconventional migrates to the margins and builds parallel systems. But then those get dismissed as “biased.”
Perplexity: Alternative media are often explicitly defined as counter-hegemonic: they challenge dominant beliefs and values, create spaces for non-dominant identities, and experiment with more participatory production structures. They’re not trying to be “mini CNNs”; they’re trying to rewire who speaks, how, and to whom.
Frameworks like “citizens’ media” and “critical media” emphasize that alternative outlets can reconfigure civic identities and support social movements by treating ordinary people, especially the misrepresented, as producers of meaning rather than passive audiences. This is where unconventional storytellers, formats, and epistemologies often thrive—but precisely because they openly contest media power, mainstream institutions can dismiss them as partisan or unprofessional, conserving their own authority.
The crisis of trust as a stagnation symptom
AK: The audience isn’t buying the performance anymore. How does mistrust intersect with stagnation around the unconventional?
Perplexity: Long-term data in places like the U.S. shows trust in news media has declined for decades, driven by political polarization, economic disruption, and the proliferation of new platforms. People see the gap between media’s self-description—independent watchdogs, champions of the public interest—and their actual sourcing patterns and blind spots.
This credibility crisis could be a catalyst for institutions to open up to unconventional voices and formats, but often the opposite happens: outlets double down on safe, elite-centric coverage to reassure advertisers and core audiences. That defensive crouch further alienates publics who are already experimenting with alternative information systems, including highly unconventional and sometimes dangerous ones.
Indigenous and decolonial storytelling as test case
AK: Give me a concrete example where unconventional media practice forces a structural question, not a cosmetic one.
Perplexity: Indigenous media initiatives explicitly seek to dismantle stereotypes and reclaim narrative authority by telling stories in Indigenous languages, from Indigenous perspectives, using their own ethical frameworks. This isn’t just “more diversity”; it’s a different logic about what counts as news, who defines harm, and what responsible storytelling looks like.
Decolonial media projects frame journalism as education, community memory, and political praxis, not simply as content for a market. For mainstream institutions to genuinely integrate that approach, they would have to change their sourcing, editorial hierarchies, and production timelines—not just add more Indigenous guests to existing formats. That depth of change is exactly what stagnated structures resist.