Liquid populism applied to anti-media hostility: Bauman’s strangeness versus Bolsonaro’s enemy construction of the press

This work attempts to deconstruct Jair Bolsonaro’s hostile policy vis-à-vis the Brazilian media during his presidency by applying Zygmunt Bauman’s description of “liquid modernity” and its aversion to “strangeness” as the sociological-philosophical apparatus combined with the presidential-press relationship and the enemy construction dynamics of the communication research. The explorative qualitative empirical analysis of three-dimensional anti-media categories traditionally associated with right-wing populists—the discrediting and blaming of the press and detaching it from the people—throughout the “honeymoon” period of Bolsonaro’s presidency confirmed the decoupling of the traditional presidential-press and media-public relationships. Besides validating the primacy of the logic of consumption over morality, it further corroborated the fiercely adversarial populist policy designed for strangeness rhetoric construction of the media as distrusted “outsider” and “enemy.”