Populist communication in the new media environment: a cross-regional comparative perspective

The changing terms of mediation place new demands, opportunities and risks on the performance of the political persona. Visibility has become a double-edged sword, leaving representatives vulnerable to exposure while new tools provide opportunities for emerging entrepreneurial actors. This double risk to elites’ mediated personas—exposure and challenge from entrepreneurs—renders their armour of authenticity dangerously fragile, which nourishes a public sense of being inefficaciously represented. It is this climate in which populism currently flourishes around the globe. Three primary criteria of mediated self-representation by politicians—visibility, authenticity and efficacy—form the focus of this paper: how do populists negotiate such demands in different democratic contexts, and wherein lies the symbiosis between populism and the new media environment suggested by the literature? To answer this, the paper compares two populist cases responding to different democratic contexts: UKIP, a right-wing party from an established democracy (UK), and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a left-wing party from a transitional democracy (South Africa). The objects of study are disruptive performances by these parties, which are considered emblematic manifestations of populist ideology as they establish a Manichaean relationship between the elite and populist actors who embody the people. The paper introduces disruption as a multi-faceted and significant analytical concept to explain the populist behaviour and strategies that underlie populist parties’ responses to the demands for visibility, authenticity and efficacy that the new media environment places upon political representatives. Using mixed methods with an interpretive focus, the paper paints a rich picture of the contexts, meanings and means of construction of populist performances

“We put the media in (anti)social media": Channel 4's struggles with unofficial archives, second-screen viewing and the increasingly visible agency of its youth audiences

Fans, and the agency of media audiences, are a longstanding cultural phenomenon. Their increased visibility and the everydayness of fan practice and user production, on the other hand, are relatively recent and have been propagated by the empowering function and disseminating power of online spaces and social media. These groups and audiences have long been recognised and often ill-served by UK broadcasting. However, in the case of Channel 4, a publisher-broadcaster with the remit to represent minorities and niche audiences while championing innovation and experimental content, minority audiences (particularly youthful ones) have historically been catered for in a variety of ways, often through the use of bespoke stranding strategies created within its schedules, catering for these neglected groups (and fans) while fulfilling its remit

Measuring web ecology across Facebook, Twitter, blogs and online news: 2012 general election in South Korea

This study aimed to provide an empirical and analytical account of online information flow and web ecology in four platforms around the 2012 general election in South Korea. The study quantitatively examined the interrelationship of web ecology among relevant platforms—including online news, blogs, Twitter and Facebook—during election campaigns. In order to quantify the current political situations, this study employed network analysis and the model fitting method with co-occurrence web visibility data of political parties and their leaders in four platforms. The findings demonstrated to what extent web ecologies on four different online platforms during the given election reflect the country’s political situation. Comparing network centralizations across platforms, results showed that online news was the least biased media and Twitter was the most biased with the highest centralization scores. Although both the ruling party and the major opposition party—including the leaders of those two parties—had higher degree centrality scores than minor parties and their leaders in all platforms, some distinct features were observed in Twitter and Facebook due to their attributes. In addition, regressions and their residuals confirmed that web ecologies in four platforms, in terms of degree centrality, had been linearly expanded over time and showed their individual characteristics