Politicized and paranoid? Assessing attitudinal predictors of alternative news consumption

The study of right-wing alternative online news sources has moved to the center of scholarly attention recently. Such sources cater to news consumers characterized by extreme political views and mistrust towards mainstream sources. Right-wing alternative news outlets have also been linked to the spread of conspiracy myths in areas such as immigration and climate change, and to the spread of state-led propaganda. However, research into the predictors of alternative news consumption is still comparatively scarce. We approach these gaps by combining online tracking and survey data from 2,009 German panel participants collected over a sustained period. We are able to capture news consumption both as a binary variable (users and non-users) and in terms of usage frequency (occasional and frequent users). We measure the tendency of participants towards conspiratorial thinking through an automated content analysis of open-ended survey items on four controversial topics. We find conspiratorial thinking and pro-Russian stance to be reliable predictors of alternative news consumption, both in absolute terms (users who manifest conspiratorial thinking are more likely to use alternative news than those who do not) and in relative terms (the more conspiratorial thinking a user manifests the more alternative media they consume). Our analysis thus contributes to a more nuanced understanding of alternative news consumers.