ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the term populis* is deployed across different press types through a comparative analysis of six newspapers in France and French-speaking Belgium: elite newspapers, popular press, and free dailies. The analysis reveals significant formal differences across press types in article length, analytical depth, and openness to external voices. However, despite these variations, populis* operates predominantly within the sphere of consensus across all outlets, functioning as taken-for-granted common sense rather than as an object of debate. This chapter demonstrates that populis* has achieved the status of journalistic doxa – a naturalised classificatory scheme that structures political perception while concealing its arbitrariness, revealing how journalistic classification constitutes rather than merely describes political reality.
