Looking back at Obama's campaign in 2008: "true blue populist" and social production of empty signifiers in political reporting

This paper is about populism as a discursive political practice and the news media. Building on Ernesto Laclau's (2005) argument of why empty signifiers are important to understand the politics of populism, this paper shows why empty signifiers matter to political reporting. I argue that the emptiness is a valuable social artifact of articulation to understand populist discourse and its manifestation in political reporting. I show how empty signifiers such as change, hope, we and Barack Obama's identity were fostered in the discourse in the American print media. © 2014 The Author(s) 2014.