The Effects of Alternative Media

Alternative media is typically a non-commercial media source that writes about topics that mainstream media doesn’t write about. They can write about what mainstream media writes about but write about problems like race or sexuality problems happening in the world. Alternative media also can involve news outside of the US like Russia or other countries with big problems. Alternative media staff is not that big and is not like the big production of mainstream media. One example of alternative media is Antiwar.

There are good and bad things about alternative media. The good thing about it is that Alternative media can include stories that mainstream media might be scared of writing or don’t want to tell the public. Alternative media is supposed to show people “the truth” about our world and what is being hidden. Alternative media can bring very biased thoughts or theories that might not be true. They might try to change your mind about topics with little evidence. So it really matters what sources you trust. 

Alternative media can be used to persuade the media on topics like religion. There is a percentage of people who use alternative media and only trust alternative media because they say it is more reliable than mainstream. Surprisingly not a lot of Americans use alternative media. Only 6% of Americans use alternative media as a source of news. More Americans rather get their news from social media than alternative media. The 6% that do use alternative media are more susceptible to false ideas or theories about things like aliens living on Earth with us or other things like that. 

Like I said before though not all alternative media is bad. Some alternative media can talk about problems within groups of people that mainstream media isn’t and that needs to be covered. One thing they might talk about is the problems that the LGBTQ community is going through and bring more awareness to that so they can get more community help. Different minority groups might lean more toward alternative media because of the inclusion of their group whether it’s good or bad. Some groups feel like mainstream media just doesn’t fill the coverage that minority groups deserve to get.

Now I have been talking about Alternative media writing about problems but they also give other types of news. An example is on Ars Technica there’s a story on the space x president saying that he thinks that there will be an increase in Starship launch rates. So alternative media still talks about good news within the world but alternative media is typically for groups or communities of people.

Alternative media affects me because I can see the news within communities that I’m a part of. Some of them talk about the news that happens within the music space or what new plugins come out. It doesn’t really affect my family because they like to use mainstream media but it does affect my friends. They like to see both main and alternative news because some of them think that the government controls and manipulates main news sources. With this being said I do think that the younger generation is going to use alternative media more than mainstream media.