Abstract
Newspaper campaigns embody newspapers’ most emphatic claims to speak for ‘the people’, and as such are generally regarded as populist. However, they can be oppositional, engaging in dissent of one sort or another, and often assume a certain amount of political engagement with that dissent on the part of the audience. This article examines the potential of newspaper campaigns to facilitate the political engagement of citizens through the politics of protest. It draws on qualitative content analysis of seven campaigns that ran in the Scottish press between 2000 and 2005, and semi-structured interviews with relevant journalists. The distinction between legitimate protest and manipulative populism is made in terms of: (a) the rhetoric and strategies of political representation, participation and influence and (b) the construction of political legitimacy in terms of the public interest and the moral authority of the ‘victim’. It is argued that populist impulses dominate, driving a tendency to use discourses of emotional authenticity and offence to legitimise demands for a plebiscitary response to popular or ‘victim’ preference and to close down controversy and debate, with the principle objective of marketing the newspaper as an influential community champion.
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Notes
For obvious reasons to do with advertising income and legal resources, the press are far less likely to be critical of powerful commercial interests.
In fact, editors argue, in rather circular logic, that newspapers’ political influence is both justified by and the cause of readers’ trust (Birks, 2010b).
Although Canovan was discussing politicians specifically (in what she termed ‘politicians’ populism) this is the form that is most relevant to protest leaders.
This is particularly attributed to the local press (Franklin, 1997), though it has also been noted that their past coverage of local politics, though more extensive, was largely uncritical (Murphy, 1976; Temple, 2005).
Of course this misrepresents both the middle and working classes, assuming the absence of bourgeois middle class institutions still reproducing values that defend their own interests and working class associations of civil society that engage in counterhegemony.
In terms of drugs cut with dangerous chemicals and of unpredictable strength, as well as an escalation to harder drugs through exposure to drug dealers.
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Birks, J. The politics of protest in newspaper campaigns: Dissent, populism and the rhetoric of authenticity. Br Polit 6, 128–154 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2011.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2011.5