From Sporadic Sympathy to Devoted Skepticism. Alternative Media Use as an Affective Sense-Making Practice

Alternative media users have long been an empirical and theoretical blind spot. This study addresses this gap by exploring the affective dimensions of alternative media use in the context of post-truth and populist politics. In doing so, the study employs a Q-sort task and in-depth interviews to analyze the news repertoires and epistemologies of 25 alternative media users in Flanders. The research findings indicate that alternative media users' sense-making practices are deeply intertwined with feelings of (mis)representation and (dis)connection, which are shaped by dominant discursive constructions in the existing political and journalistic climate.