Mediatization and Neoliberalism: Critical Conceptualization of Media Populism

Mlađenović, Nikola and Penezić, Slobodan (2025) Mediatization and Neoliberalism: Critical Conceptualization of Media Populism. AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 11 (1). pp. 93-105. ISSN 2217-9739

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Abstract

This paper reconstructs the critical deficit of media populism research. Mediatization of politics is defined as the interplay between political and media logic, but researchers rarely examine all three constituents of political logic (polity, policy, politics). The paper dissects the media within the whole social system and introduces the interplay of polity/policy, media and economic logic. It argues that the media populism research is based thoroughly on the differentiation paradigm. Therefore, it introduces Hallin and Mancini’s “shift toward neoliberalism” as a simultaneous process of differentiation and dedifferentiation and proposes networked understanding of populism. Neoliberal polity/policies are considered as conditions for the rise of populism. On the other hand, decrease in audience trust brought the rise of partisan and social media. It networked the populism today, literally.

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