News circulation between Social Networks and television in Portugal: a case study of populism in the 2022 parliamentary elections

The aim of this article is to examine the circulation of information between mass media, social me-dia and television newscasts during the campaign for the parliamentary election in Portugal in January 2022. It begins with a presentation of the context in which the election took place and the political parties and agents involved. A review is made of the literature on the media and election campaigns and the changes, in polit-ical acts, brought about by the development of information and communication technologies. The concepts of circularity, hybridism and media populism (Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2018) are operationalized, based on the assumption that certain information, after going viral on social media, then circulates (Chadwick, 2013) on the mainstream media, repackaged by mediators and addressed to broad target audiences (Baptista, Fernandes & Fernandes, 2021). Based on an analysis of television news, an attempt is made to take note of the elements of communication associated with media populism (Mazzoleni, 2008), which become more prominent in news stories that reference social media. Content analysis was the chosen methodology, and the corpus is comprised of the news broadcast during the period of the election campaign, from 16 to 28 January 2022, in the free-to-air channels RTP1, SIC, TVI/CNN and CMTV.