ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role of social media in the populist remediation of financial crisis journalism. Crises provide populist parties with discursive windows of opportunity, but we know little about the process in which the mediated salience of economic recession or crisis – especially when coverage is highly elite-driven – becomes appropriated to contribute to populist political communication. The chapter analyses how politicians from two nationalist-populist parties – the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Finns Party – have utilized news-sharing on Facebook to construct grievances, to attribute blame and to mobilize support in the context of the Euro crisis during 2010–2015. The analysis suggests that social media have provided populist politicians with alternative means for rewiring the ideological contents of mainstream news through selective news-sharing and active challenging of news frames. This contributes to making the news flow to more resonant and compatible with populist demands of replacing elites with representatives of “the people”.
