Conspiracy Theorists as Alternative Journalists
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it