Media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, strategic attacks on news media institutions and journalists have become an increasingly common feature of populist political communication. The purpose of this article is to identify various strategies that politicians use to criticise the news media and illuminate how the use and circulation of these strategies vary between party types. The article builds on a content analysis of the Twitter feeds of all members of parliament with an active account during the 2018 Swedish election campaign. Results show that political media criticism in Sweden is strongly associated with political personalisation, and it is almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon, though not restricted specifically to populist parties. Public service media rather than newspapers or commercial broadcasters constitute the prime target for political media criticism in Sweden, illustrating the need to take media systemic aspects in to account when analysing media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication.

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