AK: Media are supposed to be our reality translators. How do they become allergic to unconventional perspectives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perplexity: Mainstream news organizations still overwhelmingly rely on official sources\u2014government, corporate, institutional experts\u2014as their default narrators of reality. This isn\u2019t neutral: it embeds institutional interests into \u201ccommon sense\u201d and marginalizes people whose knowledge comes from lived experience, community organizing, or unconventional research and storytelling methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In practice, \u201cnewsworthiness\u201d becomes a filter that favors events and voices legible to existing power structures, so anything that doesn\u2019t fit those formats\u2014alternative epistemologies, hybrid genres, experimental narratives\u2014gets coded as advocacy, fringe, or noise rather than evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AK: The cult of \u201cobjectivity\u201d was supposed to protect us from propaganda, but it often feels like a loyalty oath to the status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perplexity: Critical media scholarship has argued for years that objectivity, as practiced, tends to mean \u201cbalanced between elite factions\u201d rather than truth-seeking grounded in material conditions and marginalized experience. By over-weighting \u201cboth sides\u201d from official institutions, news coverage can systematically erase unconventional voices that don\u2019t fit that binary or that directly challenge the basic frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s emerging work on \u201csolidarity journalism\u201d 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.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n AK: It\u2019s not only about how the unconventional is covered; often it just isn\u2019t covered at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t already match a recognized \u201cbeat,\u201d you are structurally less likely to enter the news agenda in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alternative and citizens\u2019 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 \u201cactivist,\u201d which lets them ignore the epistemic challenge they pose to the center\u2019s self-image as the neutral arbiter of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AK: Media insist they \u201cspeak truth to power,\u201d yet they behave like power\u2019s PR department when unconventional challenges show up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perplexity: The concept of \u201cmedia power\u201d highlights that large outlets don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AK: So the unconventional migrates to the margins and builds parallel systems. But then those get dismissed as \u201cbiased.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019re not trying to be \u201cmini CNNs\u201d; they\u2019re trying to rewire who speaks, how, and to whom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frameworks like \u201ccitizens\u2019 media\u201d and \u201ccritical media\u201d 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\u2014but precisely because they openly contest media power, mainstream institutions can dismiss them as partisan or unprofessional, conserving their own authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AK: The audience isn\u2019t buying the performance anymore. How does mistrust intersect with stagnation around the unconventional?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s self-description\u2014independent watchdogs, champions of the public interest\u2014and their actual sourcing patterns and blind spots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n AK: Give me a concrete example where unconventional media practice forces a structural question, not a cosmetic one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t just \u201cmore diversity\u201d; it\u2019s a different logic about what counts as news, who defines harm, and what responsible storytelling looks like.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014not just add more Indigenous guests to existing formats. That depth of change is exactly what stagnated structures resist.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014government, corporate, institutional experts\u2014as their default narrators of reality. This isn\u2019t neutral: it embeds institutional interests into \u201ccommon sense\u201d and marginalizes people whose knowledge comes from lived experience, community […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,460],"tags":[185,7,186,166,26],"class_list":["post-2941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexandra-kitty","category-the-damage-report","tag-ai","tag-alexandra-kitty","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-journalism","tag-propaganda"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2942,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions\/2942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\n\n\nThe invisibility of the unconventional<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nMedia power and institutional self\u2011protection<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nAlternative media as counter\u2011infrastructure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe crisis of trust as a stagnation symptom<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nIndigenous and decolonial storytelling as test case<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"