Mass media are not a neutral channel of communication. They are often susceptible to manipulation, not only through evaluative language, but also through a set agenda and hierarchy of topics. The same events are sometimes framed in drastically different ways by different television stations. This goes hand in hand with a shortage of transparent data and publicly available tools that would make it possible to systematically compare and monitor how individual broadcasters shape their coverage.

The „Populism Radar” project seeks to fill this gap by giving interested audiences a tool to analyse the level of populist language in the main news channels.

The project aims to release, calibrate and field-test a prototype web application that automatically detects and measures the intensity of populism in four major Polish television news programmes (19:30, Fakty, Dzisiaj, Informacje). Populist language is extracted using large language models (LLMs) and draws on Cass Mudde's theoretical framework.

The prototype is being developed in a Living Lab model, so it is co-created and tested by users with an interest in its future functionality. These include Jagiellonian University researchers and students, newsrooms that inform the public about current events, and fact-checking organisations. Above all, we are interested in feedback from ordinary viewers of television news, who encounter this coverage every day. We have planned workshops, joint design sessions, beta-tests and conversations. We treat these people as co-authors, not as survey respondents.

In the end, we will release the finished prototype under an open licence, a pilot report with recommendations, a map of our collaborations and an annotated dataset for further research.

Project coordinator: mgr Albert Leśniak