Replacing the Mirror of Reality – Performing Authenticity and Building Epistemic Authority for Independent YouTube Podcasting Through Populist Logics

The epistemic authority of contemporary journalism has been established around the role of a truth-teller by virtue of diverse epistemological concepts, such as objectivity, truthfulness, and impartiality. However, the past two decades have introduced an increasing wave of online epistemic contests where journalism’s central epistemological ideals have been evoked to challenge the epistemic authority of legacy journalism. Especially independent podcasts produced outside legacy media institutions have actively constructed their epistemic authority in contrast to legacy journalism by questioning its epistemological ideals and by claiming the role of a trusted truth-teller. This paper sets to analyse the populist discursive logics applied in 119 podcast episodes by six Finnish independent YouTube podcasts dedicated to the commentary of news and current affairs. The dataset was extracted from a larger dataset of 229 transcribed podcast episodes, published between 2018 and 2023, after having identified through LDA topic modelling the episodes that most likely include epistemic contestation over journalism’s legitimacy. The populist logics applied in the podcast episodes is analysed through post-foundational discourse analysis by identifying exclusionary and antagonistic articulations through which the identity of independent podcasting is defined. The results highlight a common logic through which the independent YouTube podcasts establish their epistemic authority first and foremost in relation to Finnish and American legacy media. Podcasting is articulated as a direct and uncut form of content production as well as an authentic, truly liberal, and ideology-free practice that can ultimately deliver truths about social reality. Legacy journalism, on the other hand, is articulated as ideologically biased practice that falls short from its normative epistemic ideals of objectivity and impartiality, giving a limited perception of the social reality. Eventually, this discursive logic tears apart journalism’s legitimacy since legacy media is expected to operate both as a marketplace for ideas (i.e. delivering knowledge about all available political views in society) but also to maintain societal coherence and adhere to hegemonic (neo)liberal ideologies (i.e. leaving common knowledge unquestioned). I argue that by applying such antagonistic populist logic, journalism’s traditional epistemological ideals of objectivity, truthfulness and impartiality and the newly articulated ideals of authenticity and directness are deployed to portray independent podcasting as an improved “mirror of reality”. However, by fostering and normalizing marginalized, illiberal and radical right-wing views under the banner of journalism’s epistemological and democratic ideals, the independent podcasts contribute to the subtle polarization of the media landscape by framing podcasting as an antidote to the alleged left-wing bias of legacy media. The consequences of such political polarization could be drastic for a Finnish democratic culture driven traditionally by consensus and coalition building.