The Alt-Right and Agenda Setting Theory : A study of online news outlets and magazines

Abstract: The Alt-Right is a movement that became very mainstream and this article’s research is about how often the Alt-Right movement has been mentioned in online news articles and magazines. Previous articles have researched how the Alt-Right has spread its presence on online forums and social media pages, what is written on these online forums where the Alt-Right has a presence and what their main ideas and ideology is. However, this does not explain why the Alt-Right ever became mainstream and why news outlets started reporting on the movement. The method used to research how often the Alt-Right has been reported on by online news outlets and magazines is a corpus-case study. The two corpora used for this article are the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the News on the Web corpus. The theory used to discuss the findings of the article is Agenda Setting Theory. Contrary to what might be assumed, the Alt-Right has not only a presence in right-leaning media but is reported on by news outlets from all across the political spectrum, and some online news outlets and magazines stand out.