Conspiracy Theorists as Alternative Journalists

This paper studies two series of critical incidents involving news content producers who have been described as conspiracy theorists and who, in various ways, seek to seize some professional attributes of journalism. By focusing on two case studies from French-speaking countries, it seeks to understand the paradoxical positioning of these actors, who at the same time harshly criticize journalism as an institution and claim to belong to it. By interrogating the intersections of journalism, conspiracism and alternative media, it asks what kind of alternative journalism they discursively perform. A qualitative, inductive and thematic analysis of documents relevant to the critical incidents shows the specific arguments that they mobilize in their media criticism, and how they construe these as a defence of their own way of doing journalism. If their arguments for criticizing the media turn out to be close to certain other forms of alternative media, or even to arguments already present in the world of mainstream journalism, they stand out in their specific “holier-than-thou” insistence on respecting existing rules, as well as in their conspiratorial exaggerations and their positioning as dissidents.