The growth of hybrid political actors in the fourth age of political communication

Abstract

This article introduces and explores the concept of ‘hybrid political actors’ (HPAs) and the implications of their rise for contemporary democracy. It argues that the phenomenon is not new but has become increasingly significant amid the digital disruptions of the fourth age of political communication. As explained, professions in the fields of politics and journalism have lost their communication primacy within the political public sphere, while hybridity has simultaneously enabled further boundary blurring between these and other professions. Thus, HPAs have flourished. Four of which are sketched out here are politician-publishers, political pseudo news sites, celebrity-politicians and political flexions. As the piece concludes, the growing influence of such actors challenges democracies in various ways. The recent rise to power of Donald Trump and a number of allied business celebrity-politicians, epitomises these trends and the challenges.

Introduction

Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) first wrote about the third age of political communication emerging at the turn of the century, a time when legacy media was still the dominant force. Then, at a keynote talk, Blumler (2013) speculated on the elements of an evolving fourth age linked to digital developments. Digitalisation led to ‘centrifugal diversification’, suggesting a potential end to the ‘pyramidal model’ of political communication led by the ‘former monopolists’ of politics and news journalism. If this was fully borne out, he concluded, the assumptions of political communication research would be ‘kaput’. Blumler, then a nonagenarian, never got to documenting where his predictions would lead.

This article builds on Blumler’s speculative thoughts, drawing out one particular feature of the fourth age of political communication: the pronounced growth and influence of ‘hybrid political actors’ (HPAs). It argues first that, after some decades of digital disruption, traditional political and media actors have indeed lost their communication monopolies within their own fields. As a consequence, their unofficial roles as professional boundary-setters, gatekeepers and primary definers have each significantly declined. Second, digital developments have, at the same time, enabled greater boundary-blurring across fields and the convergence of political practices and roles in the public sphere. These trends have facilitated the significant growth of several types of hybrid political actor. Such actors are not new. Far from it. But they have become rather more widespread and influential. They are a defining feature of the fourth age of political communication, with significant implications for politics, news media and democracy.

In developing the HPA notion, the obvious starting point is Andrew Chadwick’s exploration of the hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013/2017; Chadwick et al., 2015). Chadwick’s ‘ontology of hybridity’ (2013/2017: 5) documented how ‘Actors create, tap, or steer flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable or disable the agency of others, across and between a range of older and newer media settings’. His work detailed a quite significant period of disruption and challenge for political actors, and a large body of work has engaged in different ways with his analytical framework.

Arguably, the work has focused mainly on the evolution and exploitation of the hybrid media system by varied political actors, but said less about how hybrid media might also be reconfiguring such political actors, institutions and the political field itself. In exploring this, it seems appropriate to look for conceptual inspiration from work based on actor-centred, co-constitutive versions of mediatisation (or mediation). In contrast to harder versions of mass media-determinism (Altheide, 2004; Meyer, 2002), these put greater emphasis on how actors, in their use of media – legacy and digital, news and entertainment culture – alter their behaviours and practices in relation to evolving forms of communication (Davis, 2010; Landerer, 2013; Lundby, 2009).

The article looks to utilise an actor-centred, co-constitutive notion of political actor mediatisation to extend the hybrid media framework. In doing so, it also draws on scholarship and thinking around boundary work, media convergence, field theory, social media and celebrity studies.

The article is set out in three parts. The first two present the broader trends around the loss of communication primacy of party politics and legacy media, the blurring of professional boundaries and the convergence of political practices and behaviours. Part 3, using mainly US and UK examples, identifies and sketches out four types of hybrid political actor that have subsequently emerged and/or expanded their influence substantially: politician-publishers, political pseudo news sites, celebrity-politicians and political flexions.

The concluding section sets out the challenges posed to democracy, politics and news media (and scholarship) by the rise of HPAs. First, the elimination of professional boundaries removes a taken-for-granted set of informational checks and balances operating at the heart of political public spheres. Second, HPAs challenge notions of ‘truth’ and professional ‘epistemic authority’, enabling a greater quantity and flow of misinformation and disinformation. Third, their ability to generate visibility and gain legitimacy in fields beyond their own can be highly problematic. The 2024 takeover of US democracy by an archetypal HPA, Donald Trump, as well as the political and media interventions of powerful HPA tech CEOs (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg), illustrates just how significant these challenges are.

The demise of gatekeeping and primary definers in politics and media

For decades, studies in media sociology and political communication observed two common patterns within political public spheres. First, both news organisations and political parties operated through hierarchical structures and gatekeeping practices (White, 1950). Electoral-professional parties maintained communication discipline, offering select politicians, agendas and lines to reporters (Franklin, 2004; Gans, 1979). News desks had their own organisational pecking orders of journalists and issues to cover (Schlesinger, 1987; Zelizer, 2004).

Second, such senior politicians and journalists were the predominant figures of news and political debate in the public sphere. This sector duopoly dominated agendas and story frames. In Hallin’s (1994) terms, they determined which issues and debates were reported as topics of ‘consensus’ or ‘legitimate controversy’, and which were excluded as ‘illegitimate political activity’. The two sides also got to ‘index’ (Bennett, 1990) elite sources, presenting them as ‘primary definers’ (Hall et al., 1978) of news and public information, rendering other actors and issues as either secondary or excluding them altogether.

Such patterns were never as clear-cut as presumed but became a given in research and analysis of politics, journalism and democracy in the first three ages of political communication (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999). However, a quarter century later, these arrangements can’t be taken for granted any more. The simple reason is that both party politics and legacy journalism have become severely weakened and fragmented over recent decades, reaching significant tipping points since the early 2010s. There are multiple explanations for this, including the growing centrality of digital, online communication in the fourth age of political communication (Blumler, 2013; Davis, 2024).

Starting with the political field, party-based politics in many democracies has become significantly destabilised. Long-term socio-economic and demographic changes have altered once enduring relations between parties and voter groups (see variously, Benedetto et al., 2020; Gethin et al., 2021; Norris and Inglehart, 2019) with a mix of issues cutting across the traditional Left-Right political axis (Hershey, 2021; Hobolt et al., 2021). Trust and confidence in parties have declined while electoral volatility has increased markedly (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2017; Moraes and Béjar, 2022). Major parties that for decades had dominated politics in Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Brazil and elsewhere, were suddenly deposed by new, challenger parties (de Vries and Hobolt, 2020; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). Meanwhile, larger parties in two-party majoritarian electoral systems have become increasingly factional, divided and/or extreme with leaders struggling to maintain organisational and communication discipline (Broockman et al., 2021; Rosenbluth and Shapiro, 2018).

Undoubtedly, the digital platforms and social media of the evolving hybrid media system have contributed here. They have undermined political party communication hierarchies based on former privileged access to legacy media. Official political actors often make up just a small percentage of shared online sources during major political events (see Bradshaw et al., 2020). Meanwhile, relatively unknown politicians and marginalised factions can gain greater such exposure and followers than senior party figures and ministers (Rodrigues, 2019; Stromer-Galley, 2019). They have also empowered new challenger parties, such as Podemos (Spain), En Marche! (France) and the Five Star Movement (Italy) to rapidly grow and organise themselves into large, effective electoral parties within a matter of months (Fenton, 2016; Gerbaudo, 2021). While many such challenges to traditional party politics and hierarchies can be seen as positive, they have also made party politics less stable and coherent generally (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2017; Katz and Mair, 2018).

Legacy news media’s decline, especially in newspapers and local news, has been more rapid and starker still. The sector had struggled for some decades but, since the turn of the century, its business model, built on limited numbers of news producers and stable audiences and advertising revenues, has been truly broken (Reuters, 2017/2025; Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch, 2020). Most of their advertising has been taken by Google and Facebook, click-bait sites and other sources which don’t fund news production. Legacy journalist numbers are a fraction of what they were (Pew, 2022/2024) and news production costs have been continually cut.

At the same time, competition has increased on all sides with all kinds of online alternatives emerging. These began with ‘digital native’ news operations, such as Breitbart and HuffPost. Over time, numerous ‘interloper’ or ‘periphery’ (Eldridge, 2017) organisations (states, parties, interest groups, think-tanks and simple click-bait operations) as well as individual political influencers, podcasters and YouTubers came to flood the web with political information, videos and opinion. By the late 2010s, international surveys began recording that more people accessed news via algorithms in social media (Reuters, 2017/2025). Studies also suggested that partisan online news sites more frequently set agendas than established legacy ones such as The Washington Post or The New York Times (Benkler et al., 2017; Vargo and Guo, 2017). Since then, consumption trends have continued to show the online shift from legacy to alternative news and political information sites (Pew, 2022/2024; Reuters, 2017/2025) – trends likely to be further exacerbated with the adoption of AI-generated content and distribution tools.

In sum, we are left with a worrying direction of travel: legacy news is losing its dominant role in news production and dissemination. It still produces significantly more core content than any other sources and remains widely shared across social media. However, as with parties, publics trust it less, question its quality, or avoid it altogether (Newman and Fletcher, 2017; Reuters, 2017/2025). It struggles to dictate news cycles and news agendas, determine what ‘professional news practices’ should be, gatekeep the mediated political communication sphere, validate political actors or decide what is a legitimate or illegitimate story. Legacy news producers are now just part of a general melee of ‘post-industrial newswork’ and ‘networked framing and gatekeeping’ (Anderson et al., 2015; Deuze and Witschge, 2018; Meraz and Papacharissi, 2016).

Each of these trends, such as increased competitive pressures, a growing anti-elite legitimacy gap and audience fragmentation, were all noted elements of the third age of political communication (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999). But it is only in the fourth age that the full consequences for party politics and legacy media have become clearer (Bennett and Pfetsch, 2018; Blumler, 2013; Davis, 2024). As the hybrid media system of this fourth age has evolved, neither traditional political actors nor legacy news journalists retain their former primacy in the public sphere. Both sectors are fractured, distrusted, neglected or avoided by the public and challenged by alternatives. Both may continue to occupy the official centre of parliamentary politics, but they are not necessarily guaranteed to be at the centre of either media or politics as far as the wider citizenry is concerned.

The further blurring of professional boundaries and increased political convergence

Studies of journalism, politics and civil society have, of necessity, tended to assume these fields were distinct from each other. Each contained independent ‘types’ of organisation, employing distinct ‘professions’, with clear practices and occupational boundaries, separating them from each other and others. In terms of the journalism-politician divide, the ‘field’ of journalism was distinct from that of politics (Bourdieu, 2005; Eldridge, 2017). Reporters and politicians occupied opposing sides and had to engage in a tense ‘tango dance’ with the other to achieve conflicting objectives (Gans, 1979; Tunstall, 1971). Throughout these exchanges, journalists maintained a sense of distance, autonomy and professional identity (Deuze, 2005).

However, in practice, the occupations of party politics, political activism and journalism have never been as professional, autonomous and boundaried as they were believed to be. They are not professionalised in the way law, medicine, engineering and other vocations are, requiring neither specific educational qualifications nor licences or memberships to practise. Thus, ‘boundary work’ (Gieryn, 1983) has been continually deployed to reinforce professional status and credentials, to maintain the autonomy and distinction of a field (Bourdieu, 1993, 2005). This rhetorical activity establishes their ‘epistemic authority’ (Carlson, 2015) within their field, while defining and excluding ‘illegitimate’ outsiders through practices of ‘expulsion’ and protection’ (Carlson and Lewis, 2020).

Regardless of this boundary work, such occupational actors regularly interact with other professions and institutions as part of their professional duties. The large majority of politicians have previous careers outside the formal political field, and politics requires engagement with those in media, economics, the military and so on to operate. Political activists have a similarly diverse range of backgrounds and interactions with other fields. Likewise, journalists continually have to interact with and report on other occupational fields while also attempting to maintain their own professional autonomy. They are ‘a very permeable occupation’ (Lewis, 2012), both inside and outside other fields, constantly involved in the generation of ‘metajournalistic discourse’ to establish their public legitimacy (Carlson, 2017).

As suggested here, platforms and social media have strongly challenged the presentation of distinct professions. They have further ‘dissolved’ the professional and organisational boundaries that previously existed, something speculated on briefly at the end of Blumler and Kavanagh (1999: 225) piece. They have also enabled greater mobility across field boundaries. Two digital-centred developments facilitate this. First, as distinct types of political actors (organisations and individuals) adapt to, and attempt to influence their shared evolving hybrid media system, political practices, roles and personnel converge across boundaries. So, diverse political actors and news producers come to adopt the same digital logics, tools and strategies in an effort to impact the political public sphere. Digital communication experts, with their transferable communication skills, move more freely between diverse organisations and professional boundaries. Consequently, political actors increasingly take on roles and functions outside their prescribed professional, now more porous, fields.

Second, the kind of ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986) generated across shared social media platforms and networks is less bound to specific occupational fields that were once reliant on legacy media. Couldry (2003) distinguished such cross-field symbolic capital with the label ‘media meta capital’. Driessens (2013) similarly defined ‘celebrity capital’ as something with purchase beyond a boundaried profession. The mobility and transferability of such ‘celebrity capital’ in turn enables greater mobility of actors across fields. Arguably, as social and alternative media have become more hegemonic in the hybrid media system, they have enabled a more mobile and purer form of such media meta or celebrity capital to be accumulated, which is crucial to an HPA’s ability to operate successfully across multiple fields.

There are various examples of such political convergence, boundary crossing and mobility. One is the way political parties and organised interests (interest groups, think-tanks, business associations) now adopt similar digital communication strategies and tools. Parties have imported the same forms of organising, member communication and information dissemination, as well as the former employees of the new social movements of the 2010s (Chadwick and Stromer-Galley, 2016; Fenton, 2016; Gerbaudo, 2021). Both types of organisations operate ‘controlled interactivity’ with members and offer ‘dual identifications’, connecting to both single issues and larger party policy profiles (Hershey, 2021; Stromer-Galley, 2019). They are highly flexible in their networks and organisational capacities, able to grow their memberships rapidly to significant sizes and to direct them to impressive canvassing operations or demonstrations. In turn, newer populist parties, or factions within established ones, have been able to develop rapidly, making use of social media and other platforms to quickly become electoral forces (see Magin et al., 2017, on this point in relation to Facebook use in fourth age campaigning). Thus, the distinctions between new social movements and new populist parties appear harder to discern.

A second example is the further overlaps between party politics and news journalism brought by the hybrid media system. The lines separating the two have always been more blurred than many classic accounts assume, as reporters can work closely with politicians or become politicians themselves (Davis, 2010; van Aelst and Walgrave, 2017). Similarly, both parties and news outlets overlap in their attempts to retain audience-voter interest by deploying celebrity story tropes and entertainment orientations. Politicians appear more on hybrid news-entertainment shows such as Aap Ki Adalat, Have I Got News for You or Saturday Night Live (Chakravartty and Roy, 2015; Corner and Pels, 2003; Thussu, 2008).

Such convergence has grown as politics has moved online in the fourth age of political communication. As a handful of social media platforms become more important to both political campaigning and legacy news journalism, both sectors are increasingly dependent on their platforms and technical expertise (Foroohar, 2021; Kreiss and McGregor, 2018). The impacts of operating on social media platforms drive convergence, boundary blurring and role exchanges in a number of ways. First, professional boundaries and hierarchies are further undermined by the permeability of social media networks (Carlson, 2015; Carlson and Lewis, 2020). Second, politicians and journalists begin to act as both political actors and sources (Ekman and Widholm, 2014a, collection in van Aelst and Walgrave, 2017). Politicians increasingly act as media producers and gatekeepers while journalists abandon objective reporting conventions to comment on and confront politicians directly. Third, both, of necessity, become driven to adopt the click-bait content logics of social media that are more likely to be shared in the ‘attention economy’ (see Hase et al., 2023). Thus, both news content and political messaging have converged in their emphasis of the emotional, celebrity tropes, polarising and partisan rhetoric (Freiling et al., 2021; Hasell, 2021; Rae, 2021; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). This erodes politician-journalist boundaries as well as the ‘epistemic authority’ or ‘symbolic capital’ established within their own fields.

A third example of political convergence can be detected in the crossover between official, formal political actors and ‘non-political actors’. Prior to the digital media era, public figures from the worlds of sport, entertainment and business would periodically take advantage of their newsworthiness to endorse candidates and interest group causes or choose to stand for public office themselves (Corner and Pels, 2003; Marshall, 1997; West and Orman, 2003). Their interventions were a noted feature of the second age of political communication (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999).

The hybrid media system of the fourth age has enabled political interventions by a greater range of such ‘non-political actors’ to take place and with far greater frequency. Like political ones, they are no longer restricted by legacy media gatekeepers and conventions to speak to their publics (Loader et al., 2016; Marshall, 2020). Instead, they now turn to social media, podcasting, alternative radio and TV show hosting to make regular interventions in the field of politics. As such, both political and non-political actors operate in the spaces and logics of social/alternative media and popular culture, deploying the same forms of ‘performed connectivity’ towards their publics, merging their professional and personal traits (Ekman and Widholm, 2014b). Celebrity attempts to ‘embody their audiences’ become indistinguishable from politicians’ efforts to ‘embody their citizens’ (Marshall, 2020). Both resort to the conventions and practices of social media, offering selfies, tweets, profiles, professional and personal imagery, all unimpeded by traditional media gatekeepers (Lalancette and Raynauld, 2019; Loader et al., 2016).

A last example is the convergence and boundary crossing of journalists and non-journalists. Such exchanges were explored in early internet research (Jenkins and Deuze, 2008) on digital native sites, UGC, ‘co-creation’ and ‘produsage’. Ultimately, the boundary work of journalism, its normative and distributional control and its ‘right to be listened to’ continues to be undermined, as more public communication shifts to the online world. In this space, non-news producers deploy journalistic conventions, practices and genres, doing their own boundary work and seeking their own ‘epistemic authority’ (Ekman and Widholm, 2024; Eldridge, 2017; Rae, 2021; Witschge et al., 2019). As such, it becomes harder to distinguish ‘professionals’ from ‘amateurs’, ‘hard’ from ‘soft’ and ‘fake’ from ‘real’ news content.

Chadwick (2013/2017: 9) talks of the hybrid media system creating much ‘boundary blurring, and boundary crossing, as the logics of older and newer media interact’. As suggested here, over time, that has enabled a similar boundary blurring between political, media and other actors. As more diverse organisations and individuals adopt similar techniques, practices, behaviours and personnel, professional political, journalistic and entertainment boundaries are broken down. This facilitates both more individual actor mobility across professions and more organisational role adoption across institutional boundaries. It also enables the creation of new political, policy and electoral campaign assemblages, which may combine all of these actors: parties, think-tanks, alternative ‘news’ and information sites, allied interest groups, celebrities, CEOs, partisan commentators, social media companies, legacy media outlets and others.

The growth of hybrid political actors

As professional and organisational boundaries are further eroded by the hybrid media system and a convergence of practices and roles takes place, so hybrid political actors (HPAs) are becoming significantly more prominent in the political public sphere. To be clear, such actors have always existed, but their numbers were relatively small and their capacity more limited. The longer-term trends described above mean that various forms of hybrid political actors have flourished, becoming a notable and systemic feature of the fourth age of political communication.

We still attempt to define actors as ‘politicians’, ‘news journalists’, ‘interest group activists’, ‘celebrities’, ‘intermediaries’ and so on. Democratic political and media systems are predicated on such actors and institutions being discrete and autonomous. Citizens comprehend politics epistemically on this basis. However, in many specific cases, such distinctions can be quite misleading. Instead, it makes more sense to reclassify some of them as hybrid political actors. That leaves some obvious questions. How do we define hybrid political actors and what distinguishes them from traditional political actors, reporters, celebrities or other people? When does an actor become a ‘hybrid’ one and vice versa? Are there different types or even grades of hybrid political actors?

In terms of basic definitions, a hybrid political actor is one that operates beyond one area of politics and/or media, sometimes impacting on multiple fields. They do more than simply dabble in a second or third field, but regularly embrace two or more occupational roles simultaneously, bypassing professional boundaries and pre-existing communication hierarchies. They are able to do this because HPAs share particular occupational characteristics. First, they have gained elevated status in a ‘permeable occupation’ that has low barriers to entry, such as qualifications or licences to practise; that is, their professional status is more rhetorical (Carlson, 2015). Second, they are highly mobile individuals, able to move across boundaries, networks and geographical regions. Third, they seek to gain recurrent public representation via media of all kinds but, significantly, are able to engage successfully with the practices, conventions, genres and tools of social and alternative media. Fourth, they are able to accumulate large levels of ‘media meta’ or ‘celebrity capital’ (Driessens, 2013) within social and alternative media – a form of ‘symbolic capital’ that can be deployed across multiple fields. Four possible types of hybrid political actors, each of whom match the above criteria, are suggested here (some may be more accurate and applicable than others across nations, political systems and periods): politician-publishers, political pseudo news sites, celebrity-politicians and political flexians.

The first might be termed the ‘politician-publisher’. Most politicians and all modern parties have, of necessity, engaged with media to present themselves to voters. Their individual ability to do this has risen exponentially as social media gives far greater visibility and access to those who previously achieved little national legacy media exposure. Hybrid politician-publishers are distinguished by two things. First, they embrace both roles concurrently, acting as both politician and media publisher (Ekman and Widholm, 2014a; Lalancette and Raynauld, 2019). Self-promotion and public profile branding are priority activities, often regardless of policy positions. Second, they bypass party communication hierarchies, using social media and alternative ‘news sites’ to present themselves and their views. Their first loyalties are to themselves and their party factions rather than to their parties or practical, consistent policy positions. The politician-publisher is far more productive in the digital world. This is in part because they can operate free of the confines and gatekeeping properties of legacy media. In part, it is also because they are highly skilled at deploying the tools, genres and practices required to gain regular and widespread visibility on social and alternative media (Ekman and Widholm, 2014b; Lalancette and Raynauld, 2019; Marshall, 2020). Consequently, they are able to accumulate quantities of field-transferable ‘celebrity capital’ (Driessens, 2013) over and above their previous levels of ‘symbolic capital’.

Early examples of outsiders and junior politicians using digital platforms to elevate their public profiles in US elections include Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Ron Paul and various Tea Party candidates. Jump forward, and several prominent party outsiders have been extremely successful using social media and alternative sites to gain profile and/or power. These include populist Far-Right figures (Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro) as well as those on the Far Left of their Centre-Left parties (Jeremy Corbyn) (Benkler et al., 2017; Rae, 2021). They have embraced social media while treating legacy media as hostile competitors for citizen attention rather than a means of communicating to the public (Rae, 2021; Rodrigues, 2019; Rogenhofer and Panievsky, 2020; Stromer-Galley, 2019). Since the mid-2010s, such tactics have been widely adopted by junior, outsider politicians and political factions within the major parties, as they attempt to gain visibility and ‘epistemic authority’ within the political field (Davis, 2010; van Aelst and Walgrave, 2017). In the US, ‘The Squad’ of more radically Left Democratic members (e.g. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar) and the Freedom Caucus of radically Right Republican members (e.g. Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert) have gained significant political traction with their extensive use of social media, frequent video releases, podcasts and appearances on partisan news sites. Similarly, in the UK, there are Conservative and (ex) UKIP/Reform Party politicians (e.g. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadine Dorries, Nigel Farage, Arlene Foster, Lee Anderson, Esther McVey).

A second type of hybrid political actor could be called ‘political pseudo news sites’. They include the numerous online partisan ‘news’ operations that have emerged, offering a mix of video and audio broadcasts and written ‘news’ and comment pieces (Benkler et al., 2017; Ekman and Widholm, 2024; Eldridge, 2017; Mayerhöffer and Heft, 2022; Rae, 2021). Many such operations use ‘News’ in their titles or use terms which imply news, such as ‘Times’, ‘Post’, ‘Daily’ and ‘Current Affairs’. They present in legacy news formats, adopt ‘professional’ journalist conventions, presentational and referencing styles. But most deploy negligible levels of resources for original reporting (Mayerhöffer and Heft, 2022). They do not operate according to even the lower-bar standards of digital natives in terms of working to codes of ethics, fact-seeking and balance (Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch, 2020; Waisbord, 2018). Instead, they are ‘hyperpartisan’, ‘parasitic’ and make no attempts to produce ‘objective’ news. They are funded by organisations and wealthy individuals for political purposes (Dinan and Miller, 2022) and draw upon like-minded partisans from across their political and media networks to generate content. They consciously produce considerably more partisan and emotional content than legacy outlets (Bakir and McStay, 2018; Hasell, 2021; Maier and Nai, 2020).

So, why continue to use the label ‘news’ or accede to their pretence of being news operations? They should not be considered as an equivalence to genuine digital native news operations, nor welcomed and labelled as just another ‘alternative’, ‘interloper’ or ‘periphery’ form of democratising news media (Eldridge, 2017; Rae, 2021). Many are no different from politically organised propaganda operations, churning out misinformation and fake stories presented as factual news (Benkler et al., 2018; Bennet and Livingston, 2020; Freelon and Wells, 2020). As Eldridge (2017) argues, journalist identity and labelling must be reconnected to professional intentions and public values as well as institutions.

A third type of hybrid political actor might be labelled the ‘celebrity-politician’. Celebrities here traditionally refer to those from the world of popular culture, in music, sport, film or art, but should also now include high-profile activists, business leaders and others (Littler, 2007). In the pre-digital age, a limited number of such popular culture celebrities periodically leveraged their fame to set up successful businesses, to air their political views, endorse political causes and candidates or to compete for office themselves (Corner and Pels, 2003; Marshall, 1997; West and Orman, 2003).

However, in the fourth age of political communication, social media has enabled a far greater range of celebrities, activists, CEOs and other public figures to gain significant visibility across professional field boundaries. Like politician-publishers, celebrity-politicians have mastered the skills and tools to generate visibility and engage in ‘performative connectivity’ with mixed citizen-audiences. They too have the ability to accumulate large quantities of non-field specific ‘celebrity capital’, thereby enabling greater occupational mobility. A growing number of them have become free-floating mega brands, gliding across multiple sectors of entertainment, commerce and politics. They have far larger social media follower numbers than ordinary politicians or legacy media journalists, thus gaining considerable profile advantages when endorsing political causes or candidates. In 2020, Joe Biden found himself endorsed by the likes of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Dwayne Johnson, each with hundreds of millions of social media followers. Thus, such ‘non-traditional political actors’ have become ‘prominent network hubs’ during debates and political events, with their commentary being picked up by journalists, politicians and large fanbases (Chadwick et al., 2015; Freelon and Karpf, 2015; Mazzoleni, 2017).

Perhaps most significant is the emerging range of business celebrity-politicians. Powerful CEOs, such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Ma Huateng and Mukesh Ambani, now float across the fields of politics, media and business. They occupy prominent positions, with millions of followers and ‘celebrity capital’ in both the legacy and digital media (media they often own). They have all been prone to frequently pronouncing on or intervening directly in political affairs. As the 2024 US election and its recent aftermath have shown, such business celebrity-politicians have become powerful political figures as their celebrity and economic capital have gained them an ‘epistemic authority’ in the political field.

A fourth type of hybrid political actor could be called the ‘political flexian’. The ‘flexian’ term comes from Wedel’s (2009, 2014) study of certain kinds of elites in the US and Europe. Wedel has documented how such elite ‘flexians’ take multiple positions across private companies and public institutions, using their insider knowledge and connections for personal gain. In effect, such figures are almost defined by their ability to cross boundaries and become parts of multiple fields. She describes how top generals, financiers and others leverage their specialist expertise as they move across such ‘flex nets’. Some such figures use their public profiles to make specific political interventions as ‘experts’ in legacy news outlets. Like others, they have also fully embraced digital communication to both raise their profiles and participate more frequently in political debates.

Under this category should be included a range of political intermediaries and public officials whose formal role has been to serve and advise politicians and parties or manage public institutions (Anstead and Chadwick, 2018; Blumler, 2013). Intermediaries include political consultants and advisors in policymaking and campaigning, as well as those working for think-tanks and research institutions. For some years, such figures have written op-ed pieces or appeared as political commentators. Now they also have millions of social media followers and host their own podcasts and television series., Alistair Campbell in the UK and David Axelrod, Mike Murphy, Robert Reich and Mark Levin in the US, all former political government staffers, have since developed prominent legacy and alternative media careers. Political flexians also include (former) federal reserve officials, army generals, the heads of public institutions and attorneys general. Such public officials, especially after leaving office, now also make regular media appearances, develop social media profiles, record video and audio content and so on. They are presented in traditional journalist formats, introduced as distanced, more objective commentators and experts and no longer directly involved in politics. Yet, many return to politics at later dates, continue to advise administrations, maintain their insider networks and seek to intervene in elections, and political, military and legal processes. They leverage their ‘celebrity capital’ across media and politics in the same way they leverage their networks to intervene politically across fields.

Conclusion: Implications for democracy and research

This paper’s key contribution has been to identify the concept of hybrid political actors (HPAs), setting out the conditions for their recent rapid expansion alongside hybrid media systems. Their rise now poses considerable challenges for the operation of democratic systems as they rival or even surpass the influence of traditional non-hybrid political and media actors in the public sphere. Such trends also have implications for researchers, suggesting a need to move beyond studies and normative frameworks based purely on distinctive, profession-tethered political actors.

As explained, hybrid political actors are not an entirely new phenomenon. They were present in prior ages of political communication, even if Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) did not use the term. But they have become increasingly significant figures in the fourth age. The decline of party and media gatekeeping and public communication hierarchies, begun in the third age, have intensified in the digital era. So too, social and alternative media have significantly eroded the autonomy and blurred the boundaries of the professional fields that were once at the heart of the political public sphere. In turn, such trends have enabled a range of hybrid political actors to emerge and thrive across the hybrid media system.

The shifts have important implications for democracies built on stable, identifiable parties, autonomous news operations and occupational boundaries dividing these and other related professions. In some respects, such changes can be seen as positive in that they have shaken up rigid political structures and systems that have become unbalanced and unrepresentative. In other respects, such shifts are also proving to be extremely problematic as they contribute to a series of trends which undermine democratic political and media systems more fundamentally.

One casualty is the pluralist architecture underpinning the public sphere, based on a range of distinct political actors and media, structurally enabling a mix of views and debates. That plurality, not just of political perspectives, but also institutions and mediating roles, provided a set of checks and balances in the same way democratic systems do (legislature, parliament, judiciary). However, in a world of HPAs, where actors cross roles and field boundaries, that informal system of mediated checks and balances, which publics rely on, evaporates. Accountability breaks down, just as it does amid the general fragmentation and polarisation of the public sphere.

A second democratic challenge is the enforced separation of ‘epistemic authority’ and ‘truth’. This results from the ‘epistemic authority’ of traditional journalists and politicians, to be ‘truthful’, ‘objective’ and ‘expert’, both within their own fields and across wider society, being undermined. Much of the challenge has come from hybrid political actors competing for such authority and visibility. They then wield that mediated status but can abuse it by pronouncing on topics they know little of or disseminating ‘alternative truths’. Thus, they contribute to the growth of misinformation and disinformation in democracies, sowing greater levels of distrust and confusion amongst citizens.

Overall, then, the problem is not simply one of post-truths, unreliable content and the veracity of political information. It is also one of pluralism being nullified and of mislabelling those who produce and misrepresent such information. This is a consequence of all those involved in public political discourse – participants, arbitrators, regulators, commentators, researchers and others – holding onto classifications that are increasingly redundant and misleading.

To call a partisan political opinion site a ‘news producer’, with all those connotations, bestows artificial legitimacy on the operation while also delegitimizing professional news organisations generally. To label a partisan official, former advisor or political think-tank a neutral ‘expert source’ or ‘political commentator’ conflates their authority and inside knowledge with objectivity. Enabling a celebrity or populist political faction to pronounce on complex issues and gain a public hearing equivalent to established party policymakers and scientists, confuses popular appeal with accountable, evidence-based policymaking.

Each of these challenges have been made starkly clear with the rise to power of HPA celebrity-politicians from the business world governing the US in the mid-2020s. Donald Trump, his cabinet of corporate billionaires and tech CEO allies, all have a level of visibility and status in the fields of business and media, which then permits them to wield an ‘epistemic authority’ in a very different field of politics and governance. In effect, their accumulation of celebrity and economic capital enables them to impose their purely business and transactional views of democracy on very different governing structures with a questionable degree of legitimacy.

This suggests that observers and fact-checkers of public news and information should not merely be looking to establish ‘the facts’ but also to better classify or (de)legitimate the sources and presenters of such facts. Professional boundaries and pluralist information structures need to be reinforced in ways that do not hinder free speech or the emergence of genuine challengers. Thus, politician-publishers and political flexians should have clearer identifiers when it comes to appearing in legacy media outlets and have stronger restrictions on hosting programmes or editing news editions. Alternative news/political information providers, podcasters and video show hosts, that identify themselves as ‘news outlets’ should be forced to adopt professional codes of practice and be accountable to independent industry regulators. Political pseudo news sites should not be able to misrepresent themselves, just as corporations can’t mis-advertise their products nor pharmaceutical companies act like snake oil salespeople.

From both a research and regulatory perspective, the concept of hybrid political actors poses some difficult questions, especially around the classification and operationalisation of potential future studies and legislation. How does one distinguish a politician-publisher from a mere politician, a political pseudo news site from a legitimate news producer, a celebrity-politician from an opinionated celebrity? Can an individual or organisation flit from being a non-hybrid to a hybrid political actor or vice versa? These are not questions that are simple to answer and need further thought.

However, in some ways, attempting to have clear categorisations is not the point. In a world of hybrid media systems and hybrid political actors, so much has become grey. Identifying the issue and the current types of hybrid political actors is one important step in reconceptualising both real-world problems and adjusting academic research parameters. It also has implications for how we conceive systems, actors and research projects in political communication and studies of democracy.