Communicative Liminality and its Practices: A Case of Political Journalists, Social Media and Anonymous Sourcing

Political journalists have long used anonymous sourcing within their journalistic outputs. This form of non-attributed sourcing has developed within a context of increasing intensification between journalists and their political sources (or “mediated reflexivity”) and is often regarded as regulated and routinised by the practices and products of traditional journalism. Still, potentially opening the aperture on elite communicative activity are the more varied and less regulated forms of journalism that characterise the non-institutionalised space of social media. This paper explores this suggestion and charts UK political journalists’ anonymous sourcing practices that emerge within the liminal space of journalists’ social media accounts, a process we term “communicative liminality”. Its analysis reveals that journalists’ sourcing practices reflect the logics of this liminal space alongside a general journalistic interest in political conflict occurring across the period (i.e., 2016–2020). Both allow, in turn, anonymity to be used by the most powerful, but increasingly also by the less powerful as an “inter-elite strategic” tool in the political process. The paper suggests that such observations grant greater insight into the visibility of the interrelationship between journalists and politicians characterising this political age, including its moments of political disruption and conflict.