ABSTRACT
This chapter examines news discourse as the object of study. It develops the theoretical premises of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical discourse studies (CDS) that form the theoretical foundation of the book and presents the key concepts that will be drawn upon in the subsequent analyses: news genres, normalization, recontextualization, framing through discourse, and neutralism. The chapter serves as a starting point for illustrating the paradox of (and for) news journalism, in terms of its ambivalent, even contradictory, discursive positioning toward far-right populism, that will be further developed in the following chapters. Presenting findings from a cross-European study of journalistic constructions of populism in opinion press, we reveal a common journalistic meta-language on what populism is and does, but also marked differences in the attributions of populism as right-wing, left-wing, or both, across sociopolitical contexts. These findings serve to frame the discussion of if and how mainstream news media relate to authoritarian populism as a challenge, as evidenced in the discursive practices of news in the subsequent chapters.
