Pseudo-journalistic political communication: when politicians act like journalists

This article introduces the concept of pseudo-journalistic political communication to capture the strategic use of journalistic genre elements in political communication. In the context of the contemporary hybrid media system, journalistic and political communication can be observed increasingly merging, as terms such as partisan media, hyperpartisan news, or even parasitic news clearly illustrate. What remains hitherto unnamed, however, is politicians speaking, writing, dressing, and overall behaving as if they were journalists. To capture this phenomenon, we propose the concept of pseudo-journalistic political communication. The term is based on a five-fold, genre-based theoretical model, which allows the examination of pseudo-journalistic political communication from five different perspectives: its purpose, production, content, form, and reception. The model is informed by three preceding academic articles that have empirically examined all five of these dimensions by making use of qualitative content analysis, social network analysis, semi-structured qualitative interviews, and digital ethnography.