Media populism in Macedonia: Right-wing populist style in the coverage of the “migrant crisis”

The communicative style used to exclude immigrants from the idea of “the people” is the scope through which right-wing media populism is measured in a case study of Macedonia, a post-communist country on the Balkan migrant route. Quantitative content analysis of articles from four Macedonian right-wing partisan news outlets N = 409, demonstrates a clear change in tone in coverage of migration, marked by an increase of populism as the “migrant crisis” intensified. Logistic regression confirms that  incivility, as a proxy for the intensity of partisan bias, is a significant predictor of populism, and opinion pieces have a significantly stronger populist tendency than news reports. The findings show that online news outlets, however, are not more populist than traditional print media.  The communicative style used to exclude immigrants from the idea of “the people” is the scope through which right-wing media populism is measured in a case study of Macedonia, a post-communist country on the Balkan migrant route. Quantitative content analysis of articles from four Macedonian right-wing partisan news outlets N = 409, demonstrates a clear change in tone in coverage of migration, marked by an increase of populism as the “migrant crisis” intensified. Logistic regression confirms that  incivility, as a proxy for the intensity of partisan bias, is a significant predictor of populism, and opinion pieces have a significantly stronger populist tendency than news reports. The findings show that online news outlets, however, are not more populist than traditional print media