Professor Jostein Gripsrud and Postdoc Hilmar Mjelde participated at the workshop “Media Populism and European democracy” November 9. Professor Gripsrud held the presentation “Norway’s Progress Party: Populism and tabloidization”, and Postdoc Mjelde held the presentation “Crowning Moments: Transformative Populist Use of the Media and the Case of Carl I. Hagen and the 1987 No-Confidence Motion”.
The Workshop was conducted at the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with the CEMES working group on European culture and the media, and aimed to “set the research agenda for an investigation of media populism from a multidisciplinary perspective”, and hence in particular addressed the role of the media and of audiences, from a comparative European angle:
“We are particularly interested to understand the implications of the new populism for the European Union in terms of Euroscepticism, renationalisation and the prospects for democracy in Europe. There is further a curious transnational, perhaps even Europe-wide character to populism that requires explicit attention. The role of media in relation to the future of democracy in Europe appears however to be Janus-faced – it might be helping to foster populism, and it might serve to hold populism accountable. With regard to this ambiguity, we wish to understand how European institutions and government arrangements can provide support for media and journalism to fulfill their democratic functions and how regulatory mechanisms can be established to countervail the pernicious effects of media populism”