Dr. Scott A. Eldridge II
Associate Professor with the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen. He researches the ways journalistic outsiders have challenged the boundaries of the journalistic field and further challenged our understanding of journalism’s place in contemporary societies. He is the author of the books Journalism in a Fractured World (2025) and Online Journalism from the Periphery (2018).
Twitter: @seldridge
Bluesky: @seldridge.com
Email: s.a.eldridge.ii@rug.nl
U.S. Election 2024
51. The powers that aren’t: News organizations and the 2024 election (Dr Nik Usher)
52. Newspaper presidential endorsements: Silence during consequential moment in history (Dr Kenneth Campbell)
53. Trump after news: a moral voice in an empty room? (Prof Matt Carlson, Prof Sue Robinson, Prof Seth C. Lewis)
54. Under media oligarchy: profit and power trumped democracy once again (Prof Victor Pickard)
55. The challenge of pro-democracy journalism (Prof Stephen D. Reese)
56. Grievance and animosity: Fracturing the digital news ecosystem (Dr Scott A. Eldridge II)
57. Considering the risk of attacks on journalists during the U.S. election (Dr Valerie Belair-Gagnon)
58. What can sentiment in cable news coverage tell us about the 2024 campaign? (Dr Gavin Ploger, Dr Stuart Soroka)
59. The case for happy election news: Why it matters and what stands in the way (Dr Ruth Palmer, Prof Stephanie Edgerly, Prof Emily K. Vraga)
60. Broadcast television use and the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Jessica Maki, Prof Michael W. Wagner)
61. Kamala Harris' representation in mainstream and Black media (Dr Miya Williams Fayne, Prof Danielle K. Brown)
62. Team Trump and the altercation at the Arlington military cemetery (Dr Natalie Jester)
63. Pulling their punches: On the limits of sports metaphor in political media (Prof Michael L. Butterworth)
We live in fractured societies, and in the election coverage coming from a fractured digital news ecosystem we are constantly reminded of this. Just as the divisions in our body politic are evident in election results, differences between online media were apparent in the alternative news responses to Trump’s victory. From the left, coverage was mournful. From the right, it was laced with animus and a sense of political vengeance.
All of this was clear as the inevitable was unfolding. Early Wednesday, the left-wing Raw Story reported from Pennsylvania that Democrats had “all but given up.” Talking Points Memo’s editor Josh Marshall saw a “crushing result” looming. And from the right? Once Fox News moved to call the race for Trump, the election liveblog at PJ Media changed its headline from “Kamala HQ is Having a ROUGH Night” to instead read “Trump Wins the Presidency. Cue the Meltdown.” Gateway Pundit heralded Trump’s victory as a “THREE-PEAT!!”, brazenly implying he had actually won in 2020 less than a month after they settled a defamation lawsuit for spreading that same lie. The hyper-partisan Breitbart chose to top its election news “livewire” with the headline “TRUMP TOWERS!,” going on to use the linguistic idiosyncrasies of an idiosyncratic candidate to describe Trump’s win as an “American Realignment: His Yugest Tent Ever!”
While the politics these media align with are clearly different, the sites themselves have some similarities. They all launched in the early 2000s, seeing an opportunity for a brash approach to political journalism emerging in the spaces that the web provided. Each was able to establish a reputation for providing alternative, politically informed, news and commentary, and catered to a public that was eager for something different. By distinguishing themselves as a response to a complacent, commercial, and traditional approach to political reporting by the journalistic “core,” these “peripheral journalistic actors” promoted themselves as more independent, more honest, and (at least according to their own narratives) as an improvement on the journalism they saw around them.
However, that is where similarities end and as time has moved on sharp differences have emerged between those who continue to pursue journalism with a critical voice, and those who promote destructive animosity instead. Recognizing this, I argued we need to distinguish between those who act journalistically – even if alternatively – and those who instead prioritize political outcomes in work disguised as journalism. This call for distinction has become urgent in the 2024 context.
For anyone who studies these media the boldness with which sites like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit foreground their conservative support and opposition to progressive politics is unsurprising. But their antagonism towards their opponents has become pronounced in the past few election cycles. They have gone from primarily targeting Democrats and mainstream media to also critiquing Republicans who opposed Trump and anyone in the right-wing media ecosystem who is not deferential to the MAGA agenda. In 2020, they attacked Fox News for calling the election for Joe Biden. By 2024, they were going after Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report for criticizing Trump. Gateway Pundit unironically called Drudge “Leftist,” and Breitbart laughed off “whatever that thing the Drudge Report has become.”
In some ways, this defies expectations and allegiances. Without conservative sites like the Drudge Report opening the door for right-wing news blogs in the late 1990s, the online conservative media ecosystem might have looked very different. In a similar counterfactual, if you look at early archives of Breitbart you might ask, had Andrew Breitbart not died in 2012 and Steve Bannon taken over, whether its 2024 headlines would be so aggressive and its election triumphalism so profound. But Breitbart did grow more hyper-partisan after Bannon took over, just as Gateway Pundit grew more propagandistic and PJ Media went from being an independent, conservative news alternative to becoming a “parrot” of the right-wing.
Indeed, what was already apparent in 2020 has become even more obvious since. In these four years, politicized peripheral news media — what the podcaster Jon Lovett described as a “purposeful political media apparatus” — have continued to promote their content within fractured, divisive, antagonistic relationships. They have followed the same trajectory Republican politics has also traveled, echoing the fealty that seems entrenched in the MAGA movement.
In the wake of another victory for right-wing politics in the United States, we risk becoming inured to narratives of difference and grievance as once independent media steep the news and political commentary they produce in a language of animosity. But these dynamics should instead be ringing alarms. They should also sound beyond the United States, as in the UK and Europe antagonistic, peripheral media have also become more polarizing, and more political. As I argue in Journalism in a Fractured World, peripheral media still present their work as news, but on the right they have adopted affective, polarized language to address their audiences, in an effort to reach a so-called “unheard” and “abandoned” populist public. They are dividing rather than informing the public, widening the cracks in our already fractured societies.