Public service versus alternative media : How do people react when they read?

This study aims to examine how an audience reacts to and perceives news from Swedish public service versus Swedish alternative media. The study was conducted upon three news articles from public service and three articles from alternative media. To be able to examine this we used three types of methods: Eye-tracking, Galvanic Skin Response, and the qualitative interview. We used theories about news reception, encoding/decoding and “The media is the message”. Our main results showed that people, according to themselves, tend to react in a more negative way to articles from alternative media, even though the eye-tracking and GSR-analysis showed that there were no big differences in how people reacted to public service versus alternative media. It was also shown that people have a more critical attitude towards articles from alternative media than towards articles from public service.