How journalists construct the authority of their sources is an essential part of how news comes to have power in politics and how political actors legitimize their roles to publics. Focusing on economic policy reporting and a dataset of 133 hours of mainstream broadcast news from the 5-week 2015 UK general election campaign, we theorize and empirically illustrate how the construction of expert source authority works. To build our theory, we integrate four strands of thought: an important, though in recent years neglected, tradition in the sociology of news concerned with ‘primary definers’; the underdeveloped literature on expert think tanks and media; recent work in journalism studies advocating a relational approach to authority; and elements from the discursive psychology approach to the construction of facticity in interactive settings. Our central contribution is a new perspective on source authority: the identification of behaviors that are key to how the interactions between journalists and elite political actors actively construct the elevated authoritative status of expert sources. We call these behaviors authority signaling. We show how authority signaling works to legitimize the power of the United Kingdom’s most important policy think tank and discuss the implications of this process.

Russell Brand’s interventions in the political field have taken multiple forms since he famously told Jeremy Paxman in October 2013 that he had never voted. The following year Brand joined the campaign to save the New Era estate in East London, seeking to ‘amplify’ the voices of residents by attracting positive mainstream media coverage and promoting their cause to his large social media audience. This audience, supposedly outside the ‘empty stadium’ of the mainstream campaign, was Labour leader Ed Miliband’s justification for being interviewed and endorsed by Brand during the 2015 election campaign. While the attention Brand received in both cases demonstrates his celebrity capital in the United Kingdom, he also faced contestation. Brand’s wealth complicated his claims to represent housing campaigners, while during the election his background as a working-class comedian conflicted with formal political norms. Using Saward’s theory of representative claims, this article explores how Brand made claims to represent citizens in each context and how these were evaluated. Brand’s negotiation of his status and the response he received in different political contexts is analysed drawing on fieldwork, Brand’s social media and YouTube content, and media coverage of his interventions. I argue that while Brand’s celebrity capital allowed him to work across the fields of entertainment and politics with ease, his status in the political field is dependent on successfully making claims to represent citizens.

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