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The Hybrid Mediation of Populism

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Populist Communication

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Abstract

This chapter conceptualises the fit between populist performance and its mediation by mainstream and in social media. It approaches mediation from a social constructivist perspective that accounts for media materiality, imaginaries and institutions. It argues that populists incorporate media technologies and their symbolic properties in performances of mediation in the hybrid media system. Yet populists repudiate both the media and the elites who clamber for their attention to the detriment of democratic representation. In their performance of such anti-media populism, populists acquire control of their own and the elite’s visibility, come across as authentic and inspire efficacy. As visibility, authenticity and efficacy are the very demands placed upon mediated representation in the new media ecology, populists thereby smooth the process of mediating their representative claims.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Disruption can, of course, be performed in other ways via social media by breaking the norms associated with the virtual environment and with the ways in which it is ordinarily used in politics, such as US President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter.

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  1. School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Lone Sorensen

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Sorensen, L. (2021). The Hybrid Mediation of Populism. In: Populist Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65756-7_10

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