Political communication as television news: Party-produced news of the Sweden Democrats during the 2022 election campaign

The rapid advancement of digital communication technologies and the increasing prevalence of social media platforms over the last decade have significantly transformed the structural conditions of political communication. Political communication as well as news are now shaped by a series of mechanisms that Chadwick (2017) attributes to the “hybrid media system”. Hybridity refers to the blending and blurring of previously distinct cultural logics and practices of media and politics, but also to the hybrid logics that link “technologies, genres, norms, behaviours, and organizational forms in the reflexively connected fields of politics and media” (Chadwick, 2017: 4). This implies that the professional roles, identities, and norms of news production are challenged by the communication practices of other actors, as digital technologies “enable individuals and collectives to plug themselves into the news making process” (Chadwick et al., 2015: 14). Hence, in hybrid information settings, the concept of news is increasingly “unfixed” and “open to reimagining” (Baym, 2017: 12), and various new politicised news formats, often labelled “alternative” or “hyperpartisan” media, have become vital parts of the information mix that citizens encounter online (Edgerly & Vraga, 2020; Ihlebæk et al., 2022; Tandoc et al., 2018).

One aspect of this development concerns new political communication strategies. Political actors, including parties, increasingly produce information that blurs the boundaries between news, journalism, and political communication (Ekman & Widholm, 2022). In Sweden, many so-called alternative media outlets have strong ties to the right-wing populist party, the Sweden Democrats (Nygaard, 2020). The most recent addition to this media ecology, the YouTube news channel Riks, describes its content as “conservative news provision” (Riks, n.d.). However, during the 2022 election, Riks was owned by the Sweden Democrats through a party-controlled foundation (Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority, 2023), and it was operated as part of the Sweden Democrats’ communications department. Multiple Swedish legacy media reports have scrutinised Riks and the strategies of the party’s communications office (Andersson & Lönegård, 2021; Clason, 2022; Price, 2021; Steiner, 2022). These reports show that Riks was launched as a strategic attempt to gain political influence on You-Tube, a platform less successfully explored for party communication in Sweden. While the Sweden Democrats is already the most influential party on Facebook, YouTube was identified, prior to the 2022 election, by its chief communication officer as a platform where the party can “take over” in the upcoming 2022 election campaign (Price, 2021). Riks’s studio is located at the same venue as the party’s communication office and several key staff are party members, of which some were electable candidates in the election. Two of the most high-profile programme hosts were also elected as a municipal commissioner and a regional council member after the election (Clason, 2022; Steiner, 2022).

In this article, we therefore argue that Riks’s role during the election must be understood not primarily as an example of alternative media in Sweden (including those with “ties to” a party), but rather as a new form of strategic party communication. Analogous with the description by the party’s chief communication officer, Riks functioned as a flexible communication platform that was used to adapt campaign strategies to an increasingly hybrid media environment during the election, but it also offered a broader communication potential, serving the interest of the party during non-election periods (Price, 2021). The emergence of non-conventional campaign strategies, such as the case of Riks, reflect the aforementioned structural changes in the hybrid media system. However, it should also be understood in relation to the structural constraints of the Radio and Broadcasting Act, which limits political advertising within Swedish broadcast media (Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority, 2023).

While the communication strategies of Riks have been covered by Swedish legacy media over the last couple of years, there is a lack of systematic scholarly work on how political parties utilise news forms in their political communication. Hence, the purpose of this article is to explore Riks as a campaign channel, assessing how the Sweden Democrats utilised “news” as a particular form of political communication in the 2022 national election. We assess the content of Riks through a conceptual framework encompassing previous research on alternative media, hyperpartisan media, parasitic news, and news genres, in an effort to also advance the understanding of Riks beyond some of these labels.

The aforementioned advancement of digital media technologies has contributed to the rapid increase of new alternative news media organisations and actors online (Holt et al., 2019). Digital media technologies have “lowered the bar to self-publish”, and new actors are therefore challenging the power relations within the media landscape in general, and the position of legacy media in particular (Kalsnes & Larsson, 2021: 211). These various new forms of digital news organisations are often labelled “alternative media”, both in scholarly work and in everyday public discourse. The concept of alternative media could be understood at various levels, pointing to alternative production practices, news values, styles, forms, and so forth, thus impacting the media content. It can also refer to the broader practices of media production, where alternative ideals of aesthetics, participation, and decision-making are distinguishing features of “alternativeness” to professional, commercial, and hierarchical media organisations (see also Atton, 2002; Bailey et al., 2008). Alternative media is also often used as a label, pointing to the specific political affiliation of news media, connoting “alternative” as in oppositional political discourses and positions. In cases of the latter, the term is today most often connected to an understanding of populist or far-right politics and actors (Ekman, 2019), as opposed to radical media (Downing, 2001), citizens’ media (Rodriguez, 2001), or progressive and participatory alternative media (Atton, 2007). The term is also frequently used as a strategic self-definition by populist and far-right actors online, pointing to mainstream media as its main adversary (Harcup, 2005; Holt et al., 2019).

Recently, several studies have highlighted the alignment between the political agenda of alternative media outlets and political parties, for example in the UK (McDowell-Naylor et al., 2023), Denmark (Brems, 2023; Mayerhöffer & Schwartz, 2020), and Germany (von Nordheim et al., 2019). These recent studies point to various degrees of alignment between the agenda of political parties and alternative media outlets, and the latter’s flexible and semi-autonomous role in relation to parties. Similar research in Sweden has examined the role of far-right alternative media outlets and their alignment with the Sweden Democrats in a Swedish electoral context (Sandberg & Ihlebæk, 2019). These studies show that the content of alternative media outlets to varying degrees reflects movement-oriented goals, for example, dismissing opponents, defining in-groups and out-groups, supporting allies, and building political communities (Mayerhöffer & Heft, 2022). Nevertheless, these media operate independently (or semi-independently) from political parties.

Another closely related term highlighting news organisations’ affiliations to political actors, particularly those positioned on the far-right of the political spectrum, is “hyperpartisan” news media. The term refers to “news media actors who champion a specific political agenda” and is used to distinguish these from more general (progressive, participatory, citizen, etc.) notions of alternative media (Kalsnes & Larsson, 2021: 211). Hyperpartisan media and news are also a product of the logics underpinning digital and social media. As Rae (2021: 1118) notes:

Hyperpartisan news has emerged as a distinct, digital-first subculture of media. It departs from journalism’s traditional notions of objectivity, is transgressive in style, openly ideological, extremely biased in favour of a political leader and attacks the other side’s point of view, often at the expense of facts.

Following a more general trend among online news production, hyperpartisan news mainly relies on rewriting, reframing, and recontextualising the content produced by legacy media (Kalsnes & Larsson, 2021). This also points to the logics of the hybrid media system, where content is continuously circulated and remediated in various online contexts, providing news producers with an endless flow of possible raw material for “news”. Most often, hyperpartisan news media focus their content around anti-immigration narratives, deploying an anti-elite and anti-cultural or anti-media establishment framing – typical features of right-wing populist parties and the wider far-right (Haller & Holt, 2019; Kalsnes & Larsson, 2021). Hyperpartisan news benefits from platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, including the distribution and circulation practices provided by the users on these platforms (Rae, 2021).

At face value, the case of Riks corresponds to many aspects of what is labelled alternative media and hyperpartisan news. However, in this article we argue, by pinpointing the ownership and organisational structure as well as the production context, that Riks’s role should be understood not primarily as alternative media or hyperpartisan news with close ties to a party. Instead, Riks should be viewed as an example of strategic political communication from within a party that has adopted and adapted a range of journalistic conventions. Riks reflects the increased hybridity of media and politics online and represents what we previously have defined as parasitic news. Parasitic news is a particular political communication style that relies on established journalistic formats and genres and that seeks to utilise the wider social and institutional legitimacy of professional journalism in order to produce and distribute information for political purposes (Ekman & Widholm, 2022). Moreover, Riks could equally be understood as parasitic on the position of alternative media, utilising the aforementioned position of alternative media outlets during election campaigns. It is a parasitic relationship, since Riks’s label of “conservative news provision” obscures the news channel’s function as a venue for strategic party communication.

A central component of the boundary work that journalism institutions have employed historically to distinguish themselves from other information producers can be attributed to questions of visual and textual form (Carlson, 2016). The concept of “form” should here be understood as the broader communicative repertoires of journalism that cue readers, viewers, and listeners to understand the content as “news”, anchoring it to a sense of authority and immediacy including professional journalistic values (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001; Carlson, 2016; Deuze, 2005). Form concerns aspects such as the layout of printed newspapers, the visual design of television news studios, the specific modes of address characterising broadcast news, and the many presentation and writing styles that journalists draw upon when making sense of the world (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001; Conboy, 2023). While news forms are not totally fixed, as they change in tandem with technological advancements, a relative coherence in terms of form has been essential in the process of the institutionalisation of journalism over time (cf. Reese, 2022).

A crucial question within studies of news forms relates to the concept of genre. Jane Feuer (1987) distinguished two analytical approaches to genres of particular relevance: ritual and ideological. Ritual approaches emphasise genre as a form of agreement around textual conventions between media industries and audiences. Genres are in that sense pre-textual phenomena, they are based on expectations that are socially shared between producers and users of media texts. Typical examples are drama, comedy, and science-fiction movies, film genres that have been encoded with certain thematic, discursive, and visual content characteristics that make them recognisable as distinctive genres by audiences worldwide. Likewise, television talk shows carry certain key characteristics which make them fundamentally different from news-, sports- or current affairs programmes, and audiences draw on these characteristics in their day-to-day encounters with different media forms (Hill, 2018).

Through the ideological approach, researchers examine instead how genres work as instruments for the reproduction and naturalisation of values expressed through media texts (Feuer, 1987). From such a perspective, genres can be understood as “historically situated modes of representation” (Buozis & Creech, 2018: 1438), and as relatively stable resources that allow journalists to express truth claims in relation to different degrees of subjectivity, interpretation, and emotional engagement vis-à-vis sources and subject matters reported. Examples of central genres in journalism are short telegrams, news reports, live breaking news, interviews, commentaries, editorials, documentaries, and reviews (Kristensen, 2019; Lewis & Cushion, 2009; Salgado & Strömbäck, 2012; Van Krieken & Sanders, 2017). The ideological approach to genre has proved to be useful in studies of news form. News form can be analysed as “generic consistency” (Widholm, 2011), suggesting that the full set of genres characterising a television news broadcaster or a newspaper reflects how they stake out their brand identities and preferred public roles in relation to other competitors on the news market.

We have drawn inspiration from both ritual and ideological understandings of genre, because the hybridity we investigate manifests itself not only on a textual level, but also on a broader discursive level. Particularly the hybridity between news and entertainment is relevant to the political communication we study. A prominent example of the hybridity that has emerged between different forms in television can be found in “infotainment” programmes that blend humour, sarcasm, and irony with traditional and more informative news genres. American news talk shows such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Real Time with Bill Maher have become immensely popular, particularly within segments of the American population with liberal opinions (Young, 2020). These formats have now spread to multiple countries worldwide, yet in Sweden in less politicised versions (Doona, 2021; Koivukoski & Ödmark, 2020). Within the context of American legacy media, conservative or far-right equivalents, commonly described as “outrage programmes”, have not emphasised humour, laughter, and satire to the same extent, but have instead utilised anger, outrage, and divisive language to drive ratings and capture the audience’s attention (Yang & Bennett, 2021; Young, 2020). Influential examples of these hybrid genres include The Rush Limbaugh Show, broadcast on radio in the US, and Tucker Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s respective news talk shows, broadcast by Fox News (Young, 2020; Peck, 2021).

Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox in April 2023 as a result of false claims in the show regarding fraud in the 2020 US election.

Our analytical approach in this article is twofold. With inspiration from Buozis and Creech (2018), we first analyse the generic consistency of Riks’s content through a quantitative examination of subject and style characteristics. “Subject” refers to “the topic or range of topics addressed by a given news genre” whereas “style” refers to “different approaches to the subject matter” (Buozis & Creech, 2018: 1437). Since the study focuses on an election campaign, we consider references to parties and party leaders as central to the understanding of the content. We operationalised “approaches to subject matter” as “election frames”, with inspiration from how election news has been studied quantitatively in legacy media contexts (Aalberg et al., 2012). Hence, our analysis seeks to answer the following research questions:

RQ1. What types of genres were utilised by Riks and how were they distributed?

RQ2. What was the distribution of 1) topics, 2) party references, and 3) party leader references in the videos?

RQ3. What was the distribution of election frames?

The second part of the analysis draws on a qualitative assessment of specific genres, where we include “medium” and “context” as additional analytical dimensions (Buozis & Creech, 2018). Medium refers here to specific visual and textual conventions of television, such as the visual design of news studios, the different roles ascribed to “journalists” and sources, interactions between programme hosts and guests, as well as “formal constraints” of media technologies that influence the textual qualities of a given genre. In the contextual dimension, we analyse how the videos are strategically produced in relation to the party’s election campaign. Our qualitative contextual analysis thus revolves around the following research question:

RQ4. How can news genres be understood as strategic campaign devices?

For our study, we deployed a mixed-methods approach, combining manual content analysis (Krippendorff, 2013) and computer-assisted transcription and search techniques with a qualitative contextual analysis (Buozis & Creech, 2018). Our data consists of a census sample of videos published on Riks’s YouTube channel during the four weeks leading up to the 2022 election (28 days in total). To develop variables suitable for our study objectives, we conducted a pilot study, resulting in a codebook containing variables capturing genres, topics, frames, party leaders, and parties (see the Appendix). Individual videos served as our unit of analysis. In addition to content variables, we included a set of variables measuring the length of each video (seconds) and various expressions of user engagement (views, likes, and comments). Using YouTube’s API, this data was obtained to provide a necessary overview of the sample while also serving as important background information regarding the potential impact of the content. During the studied period, Riks produced over fifty hours of video content distributed across 318 videos that generated user engagement exceeding 7.6 million views, 411,000 likes, and 55,000 comments on YouTube (see Table 1).

To address the first research question concerning genre, we drew on a nominal variable consisting of seven genre categories: desk-bound news reports, in-situ news reports, interviews, uncommented party events, studio discussion/analysis, solo outrage, and satire/comedy (see the analysis for their characteristics). These genres have also been clustered into three distinctive types in our analysis. The first four are genres that scholars often refer to as descriptive genres, due to their dominance of a seemingly neutral presentation form where journalists usually do not express opinions. Studio discussions/analyses are instead typically associated with interpretative genres, in which journalists are allowed to comment or take a stance vis-à-vis the subject matter reported (Salgado & Strömbäck, 2012). Solo outrage and satire/comedy constitute a third type: outrage genres, which draw inspiration from hyperpartisan news talk show formats (Peck, 2021). It should be emphasised that parasitic news involves a strategic utilisation of these types of genres. Following the ideological approach to genre (Feuer, 1987), the use of these “journalistic” modes of representation in political communication should be thought of as strategic communication devices that are used to anchor political messages to senses of journalistic truth. Moreover, specific studio settings, modes of audience address, and so on connotate varying senses of professionalism and authority, which in turn are key cultural resources for audiences when they navigate different media genres (Conboy, 2023; Hill, 2018).

To address the second research question, first with regard to the distribution of topics, we coded nominally for ten distinctive topics. These were partly derived from previous election news research (e.g., Johansson & Strömbäck, 2023), yet the categorisation was slightly adapted to fit the specific character of the communication. We coded the dominant topic in case a video included more than one, and long multi-topic programmes (such as video podcasts) were not coded for topic to avoid misleading results. Second, with regard to parties and party leaders, we searched for references to them in automated video transcripts. Transcriptions were conducted using Whisper, an automatic language recognition system developed by Open AI. Since the system spelled some party leader names inconsistently, we included multiple search variants when necessary; for example, the party leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, was identified through references to “Jimmy” as well as “Jimmie”. Likewise, the party leader of the Left Party, Nooshi Dadgostar, was sometimes transcribed as “Norsi” or “Noshi” by Whisper, prompting us to define multiple variants as valid indicators of a reference to her. We constructed binary variables for each party and party leader based on their presence (1) or absence (0), using the identified references.

To address the third research question regarding the distribution of election frames, we drew on a nominal variable distinguishing between: issue frames, focusing on policy and subject matters; game frames, focusing on opinion polls, campaign tactics, and candidate traits; and scandal frames, focusing on immoral or exceptionable behaviour of individual politicians or other powerholders. While some scholars see game and strategy frames as different phenomena (Aalberg et al., 2012), we chose to merge them because they were interlaced in our sample in such a way that we could not make meaningful distinctions between them. To ensure reliability, an inter-coder agreement test (n = 50, 16% of the sample) based on Cohen’s Kappa was conducted for manually as well as automatically coded variables. The test showed high reliability (Kappa scores above 0.8) for all variables. An acceptable level of reliability is usually set at 0.7 (especially for conservative measurements such as Cohen’s Kappa), whereas 0.8 and above indicate high reliability (Lombard et al., 2002). Given that we draw on a census, results did not undergo statistical significance tests (Krippendorff, 2013).

In order to answer the fourth research question on how news genres can be understood as strategic campaign devices, we focused on the analytical categories of medium and context, and conducted a qualitative assessment of the videos, distinguishing between descriptive, interpretative, and outrage genre types. The qualitative analysis does not focus on single videos, but on the specific features that characterise the generic structure of each genre (Ekman, 2014). When assessing medium, the analysis focuses on visual aspects such as studio design and the geographical setting of the programme. Moreover, we assessed appearance, interaction, and tonality of actors (news presenters, guests, interviewees, etc.), including how generic features derived from television news have been adapted to social media platforms and to the various devices that they are consumed on. The contextual analysis focuses on the connections between content characteristics and the Sweden Democrats’ political campaign and policy agenda. In order to assess this relation, we trace the key policies, the construction of political adversaries, and the representation of campaign events (including performances of actors). This part includes an analysis of how framing strategies and topics are used as political campaign devices. Here, detailed quantitative results regarding topical and frame distribution are sometimes included to enrich the qualitative observations. The qualitative assessment is focused on the broader generic features and patterns of the videos, rather than characteristics of single items. The qualitative dimensions were coded for in tandem with the quantitative one (for qualitative coding of data corpus, including video data, see Bryman, 2016: 581f; Ekman, 2014).

This section is divided into two sections, starting with results pertaining to the first three research questions. Descriptive genres such as desk news, in-situ reportages, interviews, and uncommented events dominate the sample (see Table 2), and together they constitute 59 per cent. The strategic utilisation of these genres allows news presenters to provide ostensibly neutral accounts of ongoing events or, as in the case of uncommented news, broadcast events and press conferences organised by leading representatives of the Sweden Democrats. Studio discussion/analysis constitutes the second most prominent genre type (accounting for 24%). This group draws inspiration from interpretative journalism formats of the press, public affairs programmes, and panel debates often seen in Swedish morning news programmes. The third group, consisting of solo outrage and satire/comedy (17%), emphasises personal branding, irony, and sarcasm, evoking extremely emotive content in ways that other genres do not (cf. Young, 2020). Satire genres, desk news, and in-situ reportages were relatively short (mean varying between 2.9 and 5.8 minutes). Studio discussions (mean = 19.3) and uncommented party events (mean = 33.7) were significantly longer.

Turning to the topical structure (see Table 3), one topic stands out as particularly central: news about election campaigns, accounting for nearly one-third of all videos. Strategy, opinion polls, and “horse race coverage” are central traits of political news, and interestingly, Riks is no different in this regard. In addition to election campaign news, criminality and immigration/immigrants are dominant topics. This is no surprise, given that the discursive connection between these phenomena has been at the top of the Sweden Democrats’ political agenda for more than three decades (Demker & Odmalm, 2022). By focusing on the topics favoured by the party, Riks seeks to create a news agenda in tandem with the party’s campaign.

Energy was the fourth most common topic, reflecting the dramatically rising energy prices in Europe due to the war in Ukraine and the European Union’s sanctions against Russia. Other topics had more marginalised positions, with culture being the most common among these, accounting for around 7 per cent. “Culture” should not be confused with aesthetic culture, commonly dealt with within culture or entertainment journalism; Riks utilises instead a political and anthropological conception of culture, focusing on questions of media bias and Swedish cultural values. Policy areas such as economy, unemployment, social issues, and healthcare were rarely mentioned.

Turning to the question of party and party leader references, the results shown in Figure 1 suggest that Riks is used for branding the Sweden Democrats, which was the most referenced party. Almost equally important, however, was their main political opponent, the Social Democrats.

FIGURE 1

On the party leader level, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson garnered the highest representation, appearing in 25 per cent of the videos. Notable is that Jimmie Åkesson, the party leader of the Sweden Democrats, was referenced in 20 per cent of the videos. Annie Lööf, of the Centre Party, was the only party leader appearing more often than the party they represent. For many years, the Centre Party formed an alliance with the Moderate Party, the Liberals, and the Christian Democrats. However, the cooperation ended after the other three parties actively sought to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats. The focus on Annie Lööf should therefore be understood within a context of changing party relations in the Swedish political system (Demker & Odmalm, 2022).

Turning to the distribution of election frames, it is clear that issue frames dominated Riks’s content, accounting for nearly 60 per cent (not shown in the table). Through issue frames, a party can communicate their stance in the policy areas they find most important. However, a considerable number of videos also evoked game frames (34%). Hence, sports metaphors, references to winners and losers, and statements about candidates appeared frequently in the content. The scandal frame was used least often (6%), indicating that potentially negative depictions of opponents were expressed through references to (un)professional candidate traits as well as the policy positions they represent, rather than on personal immoral behaviour.

In this article, we have examined how a far-right political party – the Sweden Democrats – utilised the form of television news as a campaign tool during the 2022 national election. Our study contributes to a growing body of research focusing on unconventional political campaign strategies emerging from an increasingly hybrid media system, where the boundaries between media and political actors are becoming ever hazier. However, unlike research that focuses on the alignment of news agendas between alternative and hyperpartisan media outlets and political parties during both election campaigns and in-between elections (Brems, 2023; Mayerhöffer & Schwartz, 2020), or the adaptation of social media platforms in party campaigning (Kreiss & McGregor, 2018), our contribution highlights that news production has become an integral part of how political parties operate and communicate strategically.

The analysis of the generic consistency of Riks showed that the party utilised descriptive, interpretative, and outrage news genres. Riks represents a digital space online where party actors can present their stance in key policy areas, and indeed seek to impact the news agenda, but it is also a tool widely used for depictions of political opponents. The mixture of these genres allows the staff members and party candidates to act through hybrid performative roles and positions. They can switch from a seemingly neutral role as news presenter in one video to the host of a studio discussion in another – and even take on the role as an actor in a satire or outrage performance in a third. The content is reminiscent of the strategic blend of news and outrage characterising right-wing conservative television news and talk shows in the US (Peck, 2021).

At face value, Riks can easily and ostensibly be categorised as a form of alternative or hyperpartisan media, since it leans on taboo-breaking content, anti-immigration discourses, and an anti-establishment rhetoric characterising other right-wing outlets in the alternative Swedish media ecology (Ihlebæk & Nygaard, 2021). However, neither “alternative” nor “hyperpartisan” labels can capture the strategic underpinnings of Riks sufficiently. Even if the political ambitions of Riks are obviously shared with other far-right alternative media outlets, the channel was subordinate to the Sweden Democrats’ communications department during the election. We therefore argue that its role should be understood primarily as a form of strategic political communication, and as parasitic news that seeks to obscure this connection to the party. While the phenomenon of parasitic news is also visible among other parties in Sweden (Ekman & Widholm, 2022), the case of Riks constitutes one of the most advanced initiatives that we have come across. It represents a radical conversion of online political communication that may have conceivable future consequences. It impacts both the relation between politics and news media and between citizens and political actors in a way that challenges established roles within the democratic system. By adopting journalistic forms, genres, and performative roles (including calling themselves “conservative news provision”), while simultaneously adapting these roles to social media platforms, the Sweden Democrats have found a new way to reach out with their political messages. Unlike party-based newspapers and journals that are aimed at members and sympathisers, and where party affiliation is transparent, Riks seeks to reach an audience well beyond party members through a product that lacks such transparency. Ultimately, this may alter citizens’ understanding of the boundary lines between news and journalism on the one hand, and strategic political communication on the other. We therefore call for further studies of parasitic news – across parties, platforms, and international political systems. There is also a need to investigate the digital circulation mechanisms of parasitic news and how they may impact citizens’ political attitudes and their political interest.