Prone to emphasis and simplifications, populism uses the opportunities offered by the mass media and social networks with obvious advantages and deformations, including the spreading of false news. Anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, and disdainful of debate, this political modality claims to represent the real, common citizen, in the face of what it sees as the conspiratorial machinations of experts and the powerful.
“This book would not have been written if Donald Trump had not been elected president in November 2016”. Thus begins the preface of Francis Fukuyama’s last work, published in 2018, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.[1] Anyone who has spent decades writing about modern political institutions and, more recently, about their decline, can see how Trump is both a product of and a contributor to this crisis. Fukuyama and scholars of several currents take Trump as yet another example of their concepts regarding populism in the 21st century.[2]
Populism and mediatization, two fundamental phenomena for understanding the heated politics of our times, generate their own exacerbated synthesis in actors like Trump. This relationship is dual.[3] The populist, in an exaggerated register conforming to his nature, likes to seduce the media to reach as many people as posible with his discourse. But, distinctively, he does not accept affronts from the press. He looks upon those democratic institutions with distrust (or definitively as the enemy) which oversee him and limit his personal influence, whether the congress, the courts or the independent press.[4] As we will see in this article, this paradoxical relationship takes account of the permanent tension experienced by the media itself, between its desire to inform and its job to grab attention in times of elusive audiences. Communicational systems and historical circumstances change, but this difficult connection stays the same.
In this, populism is aided by its intrinsic versatility. To put it very simply, this versatility can be understood as a body of ideology, a style, or strategy. These dimensions highlight different aspects of the same phenomenon and are useful for its communicative understanding.[5]
Paraphrasing Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek comments that populism can be understood as “the political in its pure state”. Its components are formal, “a type of formal-transcendental political mechanism that can incorporate different political commitments”.[6] This vacuity can be completed by other ideologies, but also by the criteria and logic of mediatization.
As the word’s etymology suggests, the populist package relates its legitimacy, discourse and all its actions to the people, or to being popular. Then as now, in its various expressions —some sharper, others more diffuse—populism dramatically attaches itself to media criteria.[7]
Populism as a sociopolitical phenomenon has gone on showing its versatility. As outlined in the exhaustive introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Populism, [8] this type of movement has accompanied the development of modern Western societies. In times of rapid social changes, in which the current forms and institutions for organizing politics are questioned and delegitimized, leaders rise who speak directly to the people against the elites of the moment. The difference now is that this phenomenon has taken on an unprecedented global dimension.
Trump, in this sense, is part of a pattern that crosses societies and the entire left-right spectrum. In different contexts, with diverse combinations of styles and ideologies, populist movements emerge which exploit the distance between the citizen and all kinds of elites[9] —-politicians, media figures, experts or businesses— and feeds on the public disaffection toward traditional forms of representation. Its leaders, of various political tendencies, hold power, or have until recently, in countries as different as the United States, Turkey, Italy, Venezuela, Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary, Argentina and Austria, and aspire to power in many other places.
“In times of rapid social changes, in which the current forms and institutions for organizing politics are questioned and delegitimized, leaders rise who speak directly to the people against the elites of the moment. The difference now is that this phenomenon has taken on an unprecedented global dimension”.
Jonathan Haidt, the well-known American social psychologist, describes the basis of the offers and demands of authoritarian-leaning populism: “In many countries the left-right devision is being reoriented toward a division between the globalist elite of the cities and people of a more traditional mindset, more nationalist and less educated, who live in the greater part of the country”.[10] In their attempt to explain the same, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, celebrated for their analysis of changing values in contemporary societies, draw on the concept of cultural backlash. In particular, they see a populist demand “in the base” as a contrary response to the universal adoption of post-material values —associated with transparency, tolerance and diversity, among other things— by a global, young, and educated elite.[11]
A Flexible Idea
Populism is a much-used term, but with different connotations. Cas Mudde and the Chilean Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser,[12] observing the phenomenon in Latin America over many years, promote an ideational approach. This grants an ideological status to populism (but a light one, which can even combine with systems of ideas like socialism and nationalism). The central point is the basic moral distinction found in the structure of populism: a pure and virtuous people, the fount of the general will, versus an elite seen as decadent or disconnected from reality.
Populism’s worldview is Manichean. Its leaders always claim to personify the Good, and that those who differ from them represent Evil. They see the fundamental institutions of liberal democracy as enemies, including the press, because these are the expression of the elite they question. Their problems and issues to be solved always have two faces: the populist personalizes and concretizes the enemy of the people, posits the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. It is their way of simplifying the world for their followers.[13]
“Populism’s worldview is Manichean. Its leaders always claim to personify the Good, and that those who differ from them represent Evil. They see the fundamental institutions of liberal democracy as enemies, including the press, because these are the expression of the elite they question. Their problems and issues to be solved always have two faces: the populist personalizes and concretizes the enemy of the people. It is their way of simplifying the world for their followers”.
Its actions are not guided by the dictates of the experts; these are belittled most of the time. Especially in the 21st century, the populist knows that the legitimacy crisis not only attacks the political world, but also science and knowledge. In a nutshell, he questions fundamental Enlightenment principles. And this gives him power.
Populism invokes democratic legitimacy in order to consolidate power and, although its call is necessarily to the people, in its nationalistic versions, important groups of the population are excluded based on their political, identitarian, class or ethnic status (Fukuyama, 2018), because it sees them as “the others”, the opposite of “us” which consists of “common people”. As Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser analyze,[14] this distinction is fundamental to distinguishing populism of the Latin American historical left and European populism of the radical right. While the first calls for the socioeconomic inclusion of marginalized sectors, the European is principally articulated starting from the sociocultural exclusion of anyone seen as other: the migrant, or person of a different race.
In the opinion of Sven Engesser, Nayla Fawzi and Anders Olof Larsson, understanding populism as an ideological offering is compatible with understanding it as a strategy or style. These dimensions highlight different aspects of the phenomenon and are useful for its communicative comprehension. When populism is understood as a confluence of ideas, this refers to what message is being transmitted; when it’s understood as a style, to how the message is expressed to the people; when it is explained as a strategy, this concerns the why, that is, the motives and objectives of the movement.
An Exacerbated Mediatization?
Defined as a style, the relationship between populism and the media is not anecdotal, but substantial. This connection must be understood in the context of mediatization, through which different technological communication mediums impact different social spheres in quantitative terms (currently there is no social realm unaffected by mediatization) and qualitative terms (media affects the way social reality is constructed).[15]
This process manifests on a macrosocial plane in the political system: communication mediums redefine the ways of exercising authority, public policies and public debate in general.[16]
This mediatization finds its less than virtuous expression in the performative style of populism.[17] In particular, with the development of commercial television, populism blurs the line between politics and entertainment. This combination creates a new informative mechanism across the mediatized political scene: “infotainment”,[18] a type of news defined not only according to the criteria of the enlightened ideal which endeavors not only to exert (rationally) the public, but to hook (emotionally) the audience.[19]
The populist leader knows how to take advantage of the resources and reach that the media has allowed him: whether Silvio Berlusconi in Italy at the start of the century, as a recurring guest of television shows or exposing his personal life as a spectacle; or now with Trump, as a president who wields his foreign policy through tweets, communicates with his millions of followers over the internet, and creates conflicts in order to get likes or dislikes in the digital attention economy.
We also know of this in Latin America. The Argentinian Adriana Amado describes how Latin American populism is an exacerbated register of politcal mediatization: “Latin American populism almost always results in pop-ulism: personalism which uses demagoguery and spectacle to charm the masses and which is measured in votes or ratings, as appropriate”.[20] Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Evo Morales are the most often invoked examples. She has a ten point list of populist practices. She shows how adaptive populism turns against the “oligarchic and imperialist elite”, claims to be the heir to (charismatic) authority of the “founding fathers” and contributes to what she calls “the talk show official”.[21]
According to this logic, digitalization has not ended the relevance of television, which remains a resource: the populist has a convergent and multimedia strategy.[22] It’s enough to see the role that Fox News has played in the articulation of populist and authoritarian republicanism.[23] Fox News changes what is understood by political news, where the emotional factor is fundamental. Whether rage, attack, or fear, emotional exaltation is “the” strategy to attract politically-identified audiences. For them, Trump is not only a showman, but but offered as a subject of entertainment and emotional identification.[24]
Digital Opportunities
Yesteryear’s populists knew how to take advantage of a model dominated by massive and unilateral media, where television enjoyed a hegemony without counterbalance. Those of today make use of what Manuel Castells has named mass autocommunication, referring to the instantaneous, horizontal and individualized mediation of digital social networks.[25]
Here the novelty is not only in the expansion of a new type of media, but also in the qualitative change that occurs in the whole media environment: the possibility for permanent individual and collective connections grows, along with the number of of new digital applications, in which our social lives are registered as data that can be commercially used. [26]
In this digital ecosystem, the relationship between populism and the media renews its force, in the three moments of communication. Regarding the production of messages, it opens the door to the mass media public space , once exclusively controlled by the press. In terms of content distribution, the de-mediation of social networks makes possible the direct communication of the leader with the voters.
With respect to audiences, it favors segmented consumption in partisan niches.[27]
With this, the populist offer in all its senses is enhanced by the structural opportunities of these media configurations.[28] As an ideological body, the central notions of populism like popular sovereignty, anti-elitism, and exclusion, can flourish thanks to the ultra-fragmented nature of audiences. As a style, populism favors the simplification, emotiveness and negativity of politics; all aspects already present in a traditional media system, but which are now used more to capture attention in a content-saturated scenario. As a strategy, the new media favors the instantaneous articulation of its followers, without any deep commitment to digital mobilization.
This digital environment transforms and brings new opportunities to politics in general, but it is the populist leader who uses these resources to the limit for confrontation. With this, populism, and the communicational space that it occupies in the public sphere, once again responds to a crisis and reinforces it.
The current overabundance of information, what some have taken to calling the “information crisis”,[29] puts democracy itself in jeopardy.[30] This is because digitalization and the internet qualitatively and quantitatively affect the production of a resource that, while simple, is fundamental for the working of democracy: the free circulation of information of public interest.
The initially optimistic views on the potential of the internet for democracy[31] gave way to worries about the challenges brought by a communicational system characterized by the excess of information and the deterioration of information quality.
The 2016 American election and the triumph of Brexit in England in 2017, oblige us to take back up certain analytic categories in the study of political communication. The concept of “manipulation” is again relevant. In these events one could observe that fake news was no isolated, innocent phenomenon, but rather part of a planned political strategy of destabilization.[32] As Bennet and Livingston critically analyze,[33] behind this is the proliferation of alternative automated channels of information that promote “popular political mythologies”. The growing danger is that of a disconnected and dissonant public sphere, the product of the strategic use of negative campaigns and uneducated communication practices —with the explicit or implicit support of populist leaders.[34]
“The 2016 American election and the triumph of Brexit in England in 2017, oblige us to take back up certain analytic categories in the study of political communication. The concept of ‘manipulation’ is again relevant. In these events one could observe that fake news was no isolated, innocent phenomenon, but rather part of a planned political strategy of destabilization”.
In this environment, the central question is how citizens are filtering, discerning and circulating information, from a cognitive perspective.[35] Human attention is a scarce resource when there is such an enormous amount of stimuli that audiences are currently exposed to in the digital environment. Not only has the quantity of information that we receive grown dramatically, but so has the speed with which it is transmitted.
In this context, information communication is increasingly incidental,[36] nonhierarchical, and defined by content either shared by peers or articulated via social network logarithms seeking to make an impact through the recirculation of content. It becomes a light, brief, nonhierarchical and interrupted cognitive approach.[37] News is consumed as part of an array of entertainment content, where traditional media must now share the curation of information with influencers, non-expert social contacts and, above all, with algorithms which seek to capture attention for commercial purposes.[38]
As a response mechanism to the over-saturation of stimuli, selectivity strategies grow in number, with heuristic and biased cognitive processes.[39] With them, predispositions —political or class-based— operate with greater force. This does not always help in the discernment between true and false information.
In an article published in the journal Science, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral,[40] professors at MIT, explain why fake news is more likely to be reproduced than real news. The reason is simple: the disruptive novelty factor of fake news favors its dissemination. Especially among those whose political predispositions are more rigid, motivated reasoning operates as a cognitive mechanism: it processes information in order to identify the arguments that reinforce prior beliefs.[41]
In the same line, philosophers of science Callin O´Connor and James Weatherall[42] explain in their book Misinformation Age the social basis that makes the expansion and persistence of erroneous perceptions possible. They notice how, in our social networks, we sometimes ignore our better judgement in making decisions, and adopt the views of the others —even if these are false— in order to be part of the group. This “conformity effect” crosses cultural and social boundaries and is a pillar of the dissemination of populist propaganda in the digital age.
Tension
The changing media environment has given rise to questions about who defines truth and decides what is important in the public space (Dahlgren, 2018). Thus the ability of the press to renew the role set out for it by liberal democracy becomes even more important, namely, ensuring the quality of information and renewing its ability to prioritize and hierarchize issues of public interest.
However, the media also faces credibility problems, to the benefit of the populists.
Let us return to our iconic example. Trump labels the press that covers him unfavorably as “the enemy of the people”. In his very Trump way, he alludes to the traditional press as a “fake news factory”:
“I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it more than me. Nobody (…). But, as they showed throughout the campaign and even now, the fake news doesn’t tell the truth. (…) They don’t represent the people. They will never represent the people and we are going to do something about it”.[43]
The confrontation between populist leaders and the press is not only an expression of right-wing populism. Latin America, once again, gives us material. Kirchnerian Peronism in Argentina made the tactic of permanent criticism of the press its own. The same occured in Chávez and Maduro’s Venezuela, where the attack escaped all control.[44]
This has consequences in the media system, because just as with other institutions, this treatment strengthens previous credibility and social assessment problems. The Reuters Institute at Oxford[45] charts this with comparative data at the international level. In particular, it observes how in the United States the perception of confidence in the media is partisan: while the press is increasingly discredited among Republicans, the inverse situation is observed among Democrats.
As we saw before, the new populist forms are both the product of and reinforce the legitimacy crisis and contemporary political disaffection. The same occurs with respect to mediatization: populism is understood as a part of this process, but at the same time it nurtures the extreme and defective version of the digital mediatization of politics.
From a normative perspective, media populism, in its most prejudiced variation, challenges the foundations of the complementary relationship between democracy and the press, based on the liberty of expression and the need for information as the basic input for citizen deliberation. The populist package attacks the idea of a common communicational space, —characterized by diversity, tolerance, reason and facts— because it bets on polarization and discord rather than the cultivation of debate, and prefers to speak of post-truth.(Waisbord, 2018).[46] Without a doubt, these forms do not appear to be the way to resolve the problems of diverse democracies in a global society.
[1] Quote taken from Fukuyama, F. (2018). Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
[2] This has been empirically demonstrated by, among others, Oliver, J. E., & Rahn, W. M (2016) in their research published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 667(1), 189-206. “Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election”.
[3]De la Torre, C. (2018). “Global Populism: Histories, Trajectories, Problems and Challenges”. In Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (pp. 1-28). Routledge
[4] Once again, Trump serves as an iconic illustration, with his February 2017 tweet, in which he accuses the media of being the enemy of the American people. See Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). Cómo mueren las democracias. Ariel, Editorial Planeta, Chile. Page 211.
[5] Engesser,S; Fawzi, N & Larsson, A. O.(2017). “Populist Online Communication: Introduction to the Special Issue”. Information, Communication & Society, 20:9, 1279-1292.
[6] In Zizek, S. (2019). Contra la tentación populista. Ediciones Godot, Buenos Aires. Page 21. Zikek isquoting the book On Populist Reason, by Ernesto Laclau (2005).
[7] Mazzoleni, G. (2014). “Mediatization and Political Populism”, in Esser, F., & Strömbäck, J. (Eds.) (2014). Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracy. Pages 41-56 y Mazzoleni, G (2003). “Populism and the Media” in Albertazzi, D., & McDonnell, D. (Eds.). (2007). Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy. Springer. Pages 49-66.
[8] Rovira Kaltwasser, C, Taggart, P. A., Espejo, P. O., & Ostiguy, P. (Eds.). (2017). “Populism: An Overview of the Concept and State of the Art”. The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford University Press. Pages 1-25.
[9] Ibid.
[10]https://www.letraslibres.com/espana-mexico/revista/entrevista-jonathan-haidt-enfatizar-las-identidades-tribales-es-una-idea-muy-mala-en-una-democracia-diversa. Ideas which are also furthered in Haidt, J. (2016). “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism”. Policy: A Journal of Public Policy and Ideas, 32(3), 46.
[11] Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. (2017). “Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties: the Silent Revolution in Reverse”. Perspectives on Politics, 15(2), 443-454.
[12] Mudde, C. (2017). “Populism: An Ideational Approach” en Rovira Kaltwasser, C, Taggart, P. A., Espejo, P. O., & Ostiguy, P. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford University Press. Pages 27-47 y Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
[13] Zizek, S. (2019). Contra la tentación populista. Ediciones Godot, Buenos Aires.
[14]Mudde, C & Rovira Kaltwasser, C (2013). Exclusionary vs Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and LatinAmerica. Government and Opposition, 48, pp 147-174
[15] Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2013). “Conceptualizing mediatization: Contexts, traditions, arguments.” Communication Theory 23 (2013) 191–202 International Communication Association; Thompson, J. B. (1995). The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Stanford University Press; Hepp, A., Breiter, A., & Hasebrink, U. (Eds.). (2017). Communicative figurations: transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. Springer
[16] Esser, F., & Strömbäck, J. (Eds.). (2014). Mediatization of politics: Understanding the transformation of Western democracy.
[17] Mazzoleni, G.(2014).”Mediatization and Political Populism”, in Esser, F., & Strömbäck, J. (Eds.). (2014). Mediatization of politics: Understanding the transformation of Western democracy. Pages 41-56 and Mazzoleni, G (2003). “Populism and the Media” en Albertazzi, D., & McDonnell, D. (Eds.). (2007). Twenty-first century populism: The spectre of Western European democracy. Springer. Pages 49-66.y Moffitt, B. (2018). “Populism and media in Western Europe” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge. Pages 235-248.
[18] Blumler, J. G., & Kavanagh, D. (1999). The third age of political communication: Influences and features. Political communication, 16(3), 209-230.). Blumler, J. G (2018). “The Crisis of Public Communication, 1995–2017”. Javnost-The Public 25.1-2: 83-92.
[19] This distinction is also present in the critique of the modern public space made by J. Habermas in Historia y crítica de la opinión pública: la transformación estructural de la vida pública (pp. 1-171). Barcelona: Gustavo Gili (1981).
[20] Amado, A. (2016). Política pop: de líderes populistas a telepresidentes. Ariel. Buenos Aires. Page 14.
[21] Ibid. Page 23.
[22] Moffitt, B. (2018). “Populism and media in Western Europe” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge. Pages 235-248.
[23] Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). Cómo mueren las democracias. Ariel, Editorial Planeta, Chile.
[24] Jutel, O. (2018). “Donald Trump, American populism and affective media” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, 249-262.
[25] Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. OUP Oxford.
[26] Hepp, A., Breiter, A., & Hasebrink, U. (Eds.). (2017). Communicative figurations: transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. Springer
[27] Klinger, U., & Svensson, J. (2015). “The emergence of network media logic in political communication: A theoretical approach”. New media & society, 17(8), 1241-1257
[28] Engesser,S; Fawzi, N & Larsson, A. O.(2017). “Populist online communication: introduction to the special issue”. Information, Communication & Society, 20:9,1279-1292.
[29] London School of Economics (LSE). (2018). “Tackling the Information Crisis: A Policy Framework for Media System Resilience”. The Report of LSE Commission on Truth, Trust and Technology. www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/T3-Report-Tackling-the-Information-Crisis-v6.pdf
[30] Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S (2018). “The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions”. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122-139. Dahlgren, P (2018). “Media, knowledge and trust: The deepening epistemic crisis of democracy”. Javnost-The Public 25.1-2: 20-27. “Crisis of Democracy”, Javnost – The Public,
[31]The new forms of digital information circulation have reinvigorated alternative public spaces, which in a traditional media system would not have been accommodated. Thanks to the possibility of breaking with the communication asymmetry of the old traditional media, and new movements, of all kinds, which have been empowered thanks to new media and apps. That is the great contribution of the internet to democracy. (Dahlgren, 2018).
[32] Ibid.
[33] Engesser,S; Fawzi, N & Larsson, A. O.(2017). “Populist online communication: introduction to the special issue”. Information, Communication & Society, 20:9,1279-1292.
[34] Pfetsch, B. (2018). “Dissonant and Disconnected Public Spheres as Challenge for Political Communication Research”, Javnost – The Public, 25:1-2, 59-65
[35] Engesser,S; Fawzi, N & Larsson, A. O.(2017). “Populist online communication: introduction to the special issue”. Information, Communication & Society, 20:9,1279-1292.
[36] Mitchelstein, E, & Boczkowski, P (2018). “Juventud, estatus y conexiones. Explicación del consumo incidental de noticias en redes sociales”. Revista mexicana de opinión pública 24: 131-145.
[37] Browne, M. & Rodríguez-Pastene, F. (2019) “Nuevas miradas para viejos estereotipos mediáticos de la infancia y la adolescencia: ¿Es posible representar la diversidad?” Forthcoming, chapter of a book to be published by Unicef, Santiago.
[38] Hepp coins the idea of “deep mediatization”: being digital means leaving a trail of information, which can be used for different purposes. These data are processed by algorithms automatically. With this -Hepp declares- the processes of social construction cease to refer only to human communication. Hepp, A., Breiter, A., & Hasebrink, U. (Eds.). (2017). Communicative figurations: transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. Springer
[39] Flynn, D. J., Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2017). “The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions*: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs About Politics”. Political Psychology, 38(S1), 127-150.
[40] Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). “The Spread of True and False News Online”. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151
[41] Flynn, D. J., Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2017). “The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions*: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs About Politics”. Political Psychology, 38(S1), 127-150.
[42] O´Connor, C. y Weatherall, J.O. (2019). Misinformation Age. Yale University Press.
[43] Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). Cómo mueren las democracias. Ariel, Editorial Planeta, Chile. Page 211.
[44] Waisbord, S. (2018). “Why Populism is Troubling for Democratic Communication”. Communication Culture & Critique, 11(1), 21-34.
[45] http://www.digitalnewsreport.org
[46] Waisbord, S. (2018). “Why Populism is Troubling for Democratic Communication”. Communication Culture & Critique, 11(1), 21-34.