“Now and always against the dominant narrative”. Alternative news reporting, conspiracy ideation, and epistemic justifications on “The Citizens’ Television”

Adopting a cultural sociological perspective, this chapter situates itself in the growing research strand that refuses to treat conspiracy theories solely as faulty, disordered, or even pathological modes of reasoning. Considering conspiracy ideation as a continuum of critical epistemologies, the analysis will focus on those epistemic claims that are used both to promote alternative truths and to challenge traditional epistemic institutions. The theoretical discussion will be supported by the empirical exploration of a hybrid communicative space which fosters a generalized hermeneutic of suspicion without developing a fully-fledged conspiracy theory. This space is ByoBlu. La Tv dei cittadini (The Citizens’ Television), a multi-platform news outlet and a self-defined journalistic space claiming to reveal the truth in defense of citizens. The analysis maps the dynamics of epistemic contestations carried out by the news outlet and the related types of epistemic capital, understood as discursive strategies of epistemic justification. The findings show how the hybridization of genres and discourses by ByoBlu fosters an endless hermeneutics of suspicion where an accumulation of assonances and inferences of correlations acts as an explanatory key.