Abstract

This article examines how Portuguese Members of Parliament have incorporated journalistic media into plenary speech as external discursive resources from 1976 to 2025. While research on the mediatization of politics has shown that political actors operate in increasingly media-shaped environments, less attention has been paid to how journalism enters political discourse itself through explicit references in institutional parliamentary settings. This gap matters because such references provide a concrete way of tracing how parliamentary speech appropriates news as a source of authority, evidence, agenda importation, and rhetorical support. Methodologically, the article analyses the full corpus of Portuguese parliamentary plenary interventions (n = 726,153) using a three-layer rule-based detection strategy that distinguishes between broad media references, named outlet references, and strict journalistic invocations, complemented by manual functional coding of strict cases. The findings show that explicit journalistic references are rare overall and have declined over time, qualifying strong readings of mediatization as simple media saturation. When journalism is invoked, however, it is mobilised selectively, drawing mainly on a small set of established legacy outlets and functioning primarily in evidentiary, agenda-introducing, and meta-media ways rather than adversarial ones. The article argues that journalism remains a residual source of discursive authority in parliament, but that its visible parliamentary relevance may be weaker and more contested than normative democratic accounts often assume.

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