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.