"Don't hate the media, be the media!": The appropriation of journalistic authority by the Vlaams Belang

The intermixing of journalistic and political forms of communication have become increasingly common within the context of contemporary developments that some have labelled as a hybrid media system and others as a mediatization of politics or as a fourth age of political communication. One component of this convergence is the appropriation of journalistic elements for non-journalistic communicative purposes, a trend observable among both political and non-political actors. In the political sphere, populist radical right (PRR) parties stand out as key players in this hybridization of political communication, making use of journalistic elements with notable intensity and frequency. A case in point is the Belgian PRR party Vlaams Belang [Flemish Interest] (VB), whose political communication infrastructure heavily relies on the use of journalistic ideals, discourses, and practices. With the goal of understanding the process and implications of political communication producers appropriating journalistic elements, this article conducts a multimodal content analysis of two of the VB’s communication outlets: the website V-NIEUWS and the talk show VBTV. The analysis’ findings show that V-NIEUWS and VBTV engage with journalism (1) as a discourse, by denying the recognition of liberal democratic media norms by Belgian mainstream journalism and claiming these norms for themselves; (2) as a practice, by appropriating journalistic rhetoric, style, and technology and implementing it into their communicative strategy; and (3) as a field, by navigating the boundary between the spheres of journalism and political communication, which is being complicated by their partisan ties to the VB.