Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates the power of pairing data science and ethnography, which makes legible how Trump and Brexit broadcast news coverage and its social media ecology constitutes a battleground for the state's monopoly over white masculine domination.

Paper long abstract:

While media anthropologists have struggled with the scale and multimodality of news, the populist moments of Trump and Brexit have dictated the need for new approaches to the anthropology of journalism. This paper combines machine learning and ethnographic methods to map news coverage and its social life in network(ed) society. I argue that TV coverage of Trump and Brexit by a range of "mainstream" and "fringe" news marks a battlefield where political parties struggle over defining the relationship between masculinity and nationalism.