ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate about media populism, by presenting examples of how populist discourse, in the form of a moralistic construction of the conflict between a fictionalized ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, is enacted in the context of political news interviewing. We analyze a specific feature of question design in which the public is invoked as a source of opinionated positions in adversarial interviewing. Analyzing data from the UK between 2014 and 2017, a historical moment marked by the Brexit campaign and referendum, we identify a shift in adversarial questioning along a scale from ‘soft’ populism, i.e. the attribution of views and concerns to a generic public ‘in crisis’, to ‘hard’ populism, where interviewers construct hypothetical scenarios in which populist positions are attributed to ‘some people’. We argue that the democratic role of journalists as public watchdogs, holding politicians and public figures accountable on behalf of the public, is challenged by this normalization of populist moral order discourses in a routine journalistic practice. Finally, the discourses in question both draw upon and also contribute to the propagation of populist agendas and anti-democratic populist rhetoric.
