Conspiracy Narratives Across Media Contexts
These three papers approach conspiracy discourse from three distinct points in the media ecosystem—mainstream journalism, alternative news outlets, and platform-native visual media—yet together they sketch a shared concern: conspiracy narratives are not simply carried by media, they are co-produced by the formal logics of whatever medium transmits them. Rather than treating “media” as a neutral conduit for pre-formed conspiratorial content, all three studies ask how the structural and semiotic affordances of a given media form actively shape which conspiratorial meanings become possible or salient.
Journalism as an unwitting incubator
Rohrbach2026-rc anchors this cluster at the point of origin, arguing that conspiracy beliefs are not only diffused by legacy journalism but can be formed through it. The paper’s central move is to shift attention away from the usual suspects—alternative or fringe outlets—and toward mainstream reporting practices themselves, suggesting that ordinary framing and narrative choices in news coverage can inadvertently seed conspiratorial interpretation among audiences. This reframes conspiracy theorizing as partly endogenous to standard journalistic routines rather than an external contaminant that legitimate journalism merely fails to correct. It sets up a productive tension with the other two papers: if mainstream journalism itself is implicated in belief formation, then comparisons between “legacy” and “alternative” media (as in Balluff2026-ev) cannot assume the former is a conspiracy-free baseline.
Relational structure over referential divergence
Balluff2026-ev tests this comparative assumption empirically, using the Nord Stream 2 case to interrogate whether alternative media construct fundamentally different actor-worlds than legacy outlets. Its key finding complicates a common narrative-studies intuition: alternative and legacy media reference largely the same named entities, so divergence is not primarily about who gets talked about. Instead, the paper locates the distinctiveness of alternative media in relational structure—more cohesive, tightly-knit entity networks versus the more fragmented, modular constellations of legacy reporting—and in a heavier reliance on mentioning other media outlets, suggestive of a reactive, self-referential positioning strategy. This is a crucial methodological pivot for the topic as a whole: it suggests that conspiratorial or counter-mainstream narrative construction may reside less in topical content than in the discursive architecture binding actors together, a structural-network analogue to the “narrative strategy” concerns raised in the other two papers.
Multimodality and the limits of text-centric analysis
Gardam2025-er extends the inquiry into a media environment where the very unit of analysis—text—breaks down. Focusing on climate-denial conspiracy discourse on Instagram, the paper argues that image-centric platforms demand a visual-first methodology, since existing text-heavy discourse-analytic tools systematically underrepresent how conspiratorial narratives are actually constructed and circulated there. This is less a claim about belief formation per se (as in Rohrbach2026-rc) or network structure (as in Balluff2026-ev) and more a methodological intervention: it insists that the medium’s semiotic mode—visual rather than textual, platform-native rather than article-based—fundamentally conditions what counts as narrative evidence, and that failing to adapt analytic frameworks to this mode risks misreading or missing conspiratorial rhetoric altogether.
An emerging cross-media logic
Read together, the three papers trace an arc from formation (how conspiratorial belief originates within journalistic norms) through circulation and structure (how alternative media reorganize, rather than diversify, actor networks relative to legacy outlets) to representation (how platform-specific modalities like the image reshape the very texture of conspiracy narrative). What unites them is a rejection of media-essentialist assumptions: neither “mainstream” journalism nor “alternative” outlets nor social platforms have a fixed, intrinsic relationship to conspiracy content. Instead, each medium imposes its own logic—narrative framing conventions, network topology, or visual grammar—that actively shapes conspiratorial discourse’s emergence and form. This suggests a natural next step for the structure: comparative work that traces a single conspiracy narrative (e.g., an energy-infrastructure or climate-denial story) as it moves across journalistic, alternative-media, and platform contexts, testing whether the same content is reshaped predictably by each medium’s distinctive logic.