Casual, colloquial, commonsensical: A news values stylistic analysis of a populist newsfeed

Abstract

This study explores a mediated variety of right-wing populist discourse in the digital context, given the populists’ inclination to bypass legacy media to connect directly to the citizens to garner political support. It analyzes a sample of the Tea Party’s newsfeed headlines posted in the spring of 2019. A corpus of 308 headlines collected according to a “constructed week” formula has been coded first according to selected news values parameters (Bednarek and Caple 2017), and then with respect to stylistic devices operationalized in terms of “casual,” “colloquial” and “commonsensical” expressions. Methodologically, the study aims to combine the perspectives of newsworthiness and stylistics in order to offer a protocol for the analysis of (right-wing) populist styles regarding the genre of party newsfeeds that use headlines to cultivate prospective supporters. The conducted exploratory analysis finds that, notwithstanding the high incidence of Proximity and Personalization characteristic of popular media appeals, the construction of newsworthiness is mainly done through Negativity, Eliteness, Unexpectedness and Impact. Moreover, populist outlets strive for the stylistic alignment with the target audience’s assumed affective and cognitive preferences for news representation though manufacture of informality, authenticity and entertainment.