Abstract
That in the 21st century there has been, in the US and Europe, a veritable explosion of both populism, and writing about it, may be a statement of the blindingly obvious. But although many analysts agree that the media, both ‘new’ and ‘old’, have played an important role in populism’s development and spread, detailed studies of this role remain relatively sparse and tend to be confined to various country-specific articles. That is why the three books which are the subject of this review article are particularly welcome.
Populist Political Communication in Europe (hereafter Aalberg et al., 2017) and Communicating Populism (hereafter Reinemann et al., 2019) both have their origins in a programme funded by Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), ‘Populist Political Communication in Europe: Comprehending the Challenge of Mediated Political Populism for Democratic Politics’. This brought together researchers from 31 European countries between 2014 and 2018, and both books contain a wealth of empirical material on populist political communication.
As far back the early years of this century, the ever-increasing commercialization of and competition within the media ecology, have provided populists with highly fertile soil to propagate their messages. It was Cas Mudde who, in 2004, pointed out that politics had come to be represented in a new way by the media focussing more on ‘the negative and sensationalist elements of news’. He attributed this partly to the growth of private media interests, not least in a broadcasting sphere hitherto dominated by public service broadcasters, arguing that this ‘provided the perfect stage for populist actors, who found not just a receptive audience, but also a highly receptive medium. (2004: 553–4)
With increasingly cut-throat competition in the press and the runaway development of the web, we are faced with a media environment which, as Toril Aalborg and Claes H. de Vreese put it in their introductory chapter to Aalberg et al. (2017), provides ‘populist actors with news opportunities that allow them to “crash” the established media gates’, weaken the traditional public interest functions of established media outlets and encourage ‘ratings-driven outlets to pander to populist reactionary political agendas and to adopt populist frames on a range of prescient political issues’ (p. 7).
The chapter by Frank Esser, Agnieska Stępińska and David Nicholas Hopman, which draws together the project’s cross-national findings, makes a very useful distinction between three different iterations of media populism: populism by the media, populism through the media, and populist citizen journalism.
Populism by the media occurs when media organization actively and consciously engage in disseminating populist ideology and propaganda. This is particularly easy when populist politicians own media outlets, as in Hungary, Czechia and Romania, or when they are in the hands of fundamentalist Christian groups, as in the US. Populism through the media occurs when the media amplify politicians’ populist messages. Either this can be done deliberately, or it is simply a result of routine journalistic practices. As Esser, Stępińska and Hopman put it, there is a mutually beneficial convergence here between the economics of the media and the ideological goals of populist political movements: ‘Charismatic leaders, harsh rhetoric and stirring issues hit all the right keys of newsworthiness’ (Aalberg et al.: 369). Finally, populist citizen journalism occurs when media organizations open their doors to populist messages by audience members – usually in the form of reader comments on their websites. Examples of this practice are provided daily in the UK by MailOnline, although the website of the Telegraph frequently runs it a close second.
A crucial point made by the editors of Reinemann et al. (2019) is that just as populism appears in different forms across the globe, so populist political communication is a ‘multi-dimensional phenomenon that can present itself in many different shapes and forms’ (p. 4). Thus, they argue, the study of the macro-level context in which populism occurs is crucial, since different contexts provide different opportunities for populist measures. Key in terms of context are the media structures of different cultures, as well as public attitudes towards the media. Unfortunately, comparative studies have been relatively rare, and the editors of the present one argue that contrary to universalist narratives about populism, ‘there are no simple and across-the-board conclusions about workings of populist communications across Europe’, concluding ‘the dynamics and patterns of populist communication and how it is covered and perceived still seem to be strongly affected by national contexts’. (2019: 242)
Reinemann et al. (2019) also contains revealing accounts of interviews with journalists and politicians in 13 and 11 European countries respectively. The former overwhelmingly saw populism as a ‘negative force’ which has ‘detrimental consequences for European democracies and societies’. This was especially true in the case of countries in which populists were in government. On the other hand, the politicians regarded media competition and commercialization as ‘driving factors that contribute to a tabloidization of news-making… enhancing the chances of populist messages and actors being covered’ and saw social media ‘as conducive to populist success because of the opportunities they provide for populists in particular to bypass the traditional news media’ (p. 237). The authors conclude that these differences may be indicative of a problematic unwillingness by journalists to accept the fact they may unwittingly support populist agendas and rhetoric (p. 238). This last point is a crucial one, and the authors suggest that journalists’ uncertainty about how to deal with populism is often related to ‘a more general insecurity about journalism’s role in a liberal democracy under pressure. Therefore, a necessary step for journalists and media organizations is to reflect on their values and their role in democracy’ (p. 243). In particular, they should ask themselves whether they are simply passive conveyors of information, and at what point they should explicitly defend democratic values. In the authors’ view, they certainly should do so, as well as ‘give voice to critics when foundations of liberal democracy… are challenged – or when populist parties (or parts of them) cross the line toward extremism’ (p. 244). Furthermore, given the use which populists readily make of dis- and mis-information, journalists should be particularly assiduous in checking facts and correcting errors, as well as being extremely wary of creating ‘false equivalences’ by giving as much weight to the extreme opinions of minority pressure groups as to majoritarian expert views.
Lone Sorenson, the author of Populist Communication: Ideology, Performance, Mediation, is also a contributor to one of the chapters in Aalborg et al. (2017) and has been involved in the above-mentioned COST populism project. In the present book she draws on interviews which she conducted as a member of one of its working groups.
Observing that ‘communication is the rocket fuel of populist parties and leaders’ (p. 4), Sorensen explains that her focus is on ‘how populism creates meaning – on what populism does communicatively’ rather than on developing a definition of populism itself. She also notes that the book takes ‘an integrated approach to the media ecology’, because although populists are routinely identified as making extensive use of social media, ‘like other politicians, populists use and address a variety of media platforms and types’ (p. 5), with populists adapting their communications to the norms and conditions of different platforms.
However, the populist communicative process, has two core elements. First, it attempts to delegitimise what it characterises as ‘elite’ forms of representation (‘fake news’, #ScumMedia and so on) and, second, it claims to speak for ‘ordinary people’ in their own terms. This involves breaching ‘institutional and professional norms of politics, whether through speech, tone, dress, gesture or other means’ (p. 142). All of this in the cause of communicating a sense of ‘authenticity’ – what Sorenson refers to as ‘showing doing exposure’ and ‘showing being ordinary’ (p. 143). Examples are MEPs from the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) turning their backs on the European Parliament during the singing of the ‘Ode to Joy’ or Nigel Farage being interviewed on television in pubs with a pint of beer in his hand and smoking a cigarette. But the key point here is that these breaches of conventional political behaviour are performative and constitute a ‘display of ordinariness that aims to establish the relationship between populist representatives and the represented’ (emphasis in original, p. 142). But, of course, the success of this kind of performance depends precisely on not itself appearing artificial or contrived – in other words, inauthentic, even though these are entirely staged acts.
In order to demonstrate how populist communication plays out in practice, the book compares performances by two populist parties with very different political programmes and ideological backgrounds – UKIP in the UK and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFFs) in South Africa. By comparing populist communication in a transitional and an established democracy, and by focussing on the two countries’ different modes of representation and political cultures, and the stability of their political systems, the study can look at both left-wing and right-wing forms of populism to ‘appreciate the shared elements of the populist communication process’ (p. 7). It finds that both parties, although operating in very different media systems, made effective use of hybrid modes of mediation directed at different audiences. Sorensen argues that the South African government’s effective censorship of the EFF on the mainstream broadcast media pushed it to stage many of its disruptive acts on Twitter – where it also turned the government’s exercise of its censorship powers into yet another performative resource. UKIP, on the other hand, was able to perform many of its disruptive acts in public in the European Parliament, and its use of Twitter played a more limited role in the party’s assemblage of hybrid mediated performances. Sorensen argues that its use of Twitter was to attract the attention of legacy media. But in fact, UKIP, and Farage in particular, already had a highly significant presence in the legacy media which had very little to do with Twitter activity. Farage had appeared on the BBC’s Question Time more than 30 times, he also had a regular column in the Express as well as contributing frequently to other right-wing papers and the Spectator (and even a column in the liberal Independent at one time). In 2015, the then owner of the Express, Richard Desmond, donated over £1m to UKIP’s campaign in that year’s General Election, and the paper urged its readers to vote for the party. Furthermore, its former political editor and chief political commentator, Patrick O’Flynn, served at one time as a UKIP MEP.
Indeed, Sorensen more than once quotes a UKIP Tweet that references one of Farage’s Express columns. This was from 4 July 2014 and was revealingly headlined ‘“UKIP hasn’t gone to Brussels to be placid and inert” vows Nigel Farage’, and she marshals it as part of her argument that UKIP used Twitter to address and attract the attention of the mainstream media. But this is to get things the wrong way round, because what we have here is a very clear example of UKIP using a national newspaper article in order to bounce its message onto Twitter. Furthermore, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Petley, 2021), this is a very far from uncommon route in the UK when it comes to populist (and indeed more extreme) messages making their way into the online world – entirely unsurprisingly given the dominance of populist-inclined right-wing papers in its national press ecology.
This is something which urgently needs further investigation and analysis. In the chapter on the UK by James Stanyer, Cristina Archetti and Lone Sorensen in Aalberg et al. (2017) the authors correctly note that ‘the most striking feature of the literature about media and populism in the United Kingdom is its patchy nature’ (p. 169) and this is still the case. Furthermore, much of the literature which they cite concerns the British National Party and the English Defence League (p. 169–70). However, I would argue that, although their ideologies certainly contain populist elements, these are basically single-issue, outright racist parties, and thus it is to be expected that they have never found overt support even in the most right-wing of British national newspapers. However, populist discourse is alive and well in Britain today: in the right wing of the Tory party to which former UKIP members have emigrated en masse and in the newspapers which ever more vociferously support that wing of the party, namely the Mail, Sun, Express and Telegraph, as well as on GB News and TalkTV. And these are sources which endlessly direct their energies to producing the kind of populist clickbait that is meat and drink to many denizens of the online world. There are extremely rich pickings here for any student of populist political communication, and the three books which are the subject of this review article should be required reading for any form of research into this increasingly troubling development for the health of democracy in Britain.