How journalists construct the authority of their sources is an essential part of how news comes to have power in politics and how political actors legitimize their roles to publics. Focusing on economic policy reporting and a dataset of 133 hours of mainstream broadcast news from the 5-week 2015 UK general election campaign, we theorize and empirically illustrate how the construction of expert source authority works. To build our theory, we integrate four strands of thought: an important, though in recent years neglected, tradition in the sociology of news concerned with ‘primary definers’; the underdeveloped literature on expert think tanks and media; recent work in journalism studies advocating a relational approach to authority; and elements from the discursive psychology approach to the construction of facticity in interactive settings. Our central contribution is a new perspective on source authority: the identification of behaviors that are key to how the interactions between journalists and elite political actors actively construct the elevated authoritative status of expert sources. We call these behaviors authority signaling. We show how authority signaling works to legitimize the power of the United Kingdom’s most important policy think tank and discuss the implications of this process.

In recent years, the growth of new alternative media has brought greater editorial choice and diversity to political coverage in many advanced democracies. But their coverage of mainstream media and portrayal of professional journalism has been subject to little academic attention. This study examined the role alternative political media play in advancing public debate about the value and editorial standards of a national media system. Drawing on a longitudinal content analysis of UK alternative media between 2015 and 2018 (N = 3452), we found that mainstream media was often crticised-particularly in left-wing sites-and that disapproval of professional journalism intensified over time, most strikingly during the 2017 general election campaign. We also discovered that BBC news was often singled out for its political reporting, with criticism directed at its perceived bias and lack of impartiality. Overall, we argue it is the dominant characteristics of mainstream media in national media systems that help shape the editorial agenda of alternative media and the nature of criticism directed at professional journalism. We conclude that more comparative research is needed about how alternative media represent professional journalism, and whether they are influencing people's understanding of politics and public affairs.

Alternative online political media (AOPM) have become increasingly prominent elements of the media system in many countries. In response, numerous academic studies have examined the nature of these newer forms of alternative media. In line with this recent scholarship, in this study we carry out a longitudinal and systematic content analysis of nine AOPM websites in the United Kingdom (UK) ( N = 3452) between 2015 and 2018. Overall, we found a diversity of content, contrasting values and degrees of partisanship, which we develop into a typology of outlets. This includes four overlapping areas: electoral hyperpartisans, cultural partisans, political cycle specialists and vernacular macro-blogs. We conclude by recommending that scholars need to develop more detailed content analyses in order to better understand online alternative media, their interactions with the wider media system, and the system itself.

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