Media Populism: Journalists’ (Anti)populism Strategies in Reporting the “Refugee Crisis”

This paper analyses “media populism” (Krämer 2014, Pajnik and Sauer 2017) based on understandings of populism primarily as communication, acknowledging that populism as thin-centered ideology (Mudde 2004) goes together with communication or communicative style (Kriesi 2014). We argue that media populism refers both to the communication of actors in the political field and the media field, and the crosscuttings of these two fields and the interaction of actors in them is crucial for (and lacking in) contemporary populism analysis. Empirically we focus to analyse media populism at the example of selected newspapers in post-socialist Slovenia (the quality paper “Delo” and the tabloid “Slovenske novice”, the two most read newspapers according to the national data on readership), addressing the topic of the “refugee crisis” in the period 2015-2018. We hypothesise to find a general tendency of journalists to employ populist antagonisms and affective communication when reporting about migration and the relation of the topic to whereabouts of the political elites. The media-centric perspective enables to see that the inclination to disseminate populist messages can be reproduced in journalistic routines, norms and practices; journalists may pay disproportionate attention to populist politicians because of their high news value, conflictive behaviours or their emotional appeals that are expected to increase ratings or readership and viewers (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Also, as populist parties gain voters, media are pressed to cover these actors not to be perceived as biased, and to follow the expected journalistic practices of newsworthiness (Mazzoleni 2003). Approaching media populism, we consult recent literature (Esser at al. 2017; Suiter et al. 2018, 398-399) that distinguishes populism by the media and through the media: populism by the media refers to media that engage in their own populism, i.e. media appear as actors who generate or initiate populist communication while populism through the media refers to media that more or less accommodate populist communication and amplify populist voices. Populism by the media is analysed by researching to what an extent journalists of newspapers in Slovenia in reporting about migration construct the three populist antagonisms, i.e. anti-elitism, people-centrism (Mudde 2004; Rooduijn 2019) and othering (Suiter et al. 2018). We approach populism through the media by analysing whether journalists endorse the populist position or adapt a confrontational or critical stance (de Jonge 2019; Wettstein et al. 2018). Apart from initiating, accommodating or confronting populism, the media can also ignore populist actors and views, adopting demarcation strategy (de Jonge 2019).