YouTubified (political) talk shows as participatory endorsement: a case study of <i>Piers Morgan vs. Bassem Youssef on Palestine’s Treatment</i>

Abstract Digital platforms have transformed political talk shows from one-directional broadcast formats into participatory environments in which audiences actively evaluate, reinterpret, and publicly judge mediated debates. YouTube enables users to engage with political infotainment content through visible interaction metrics such as likes, comments, and emojis. Drawing on the theory of participatory culture, this study examines how YouTube users collectively construct power relations through engagement with a viral political talk-show episode: “Israel-Hamas War: Piers Morgan vs. Bassem Youssef on Palestine’s Treatment.” Conceptualizing audience engagement as participatory endorsement, the study argues that users do not merely react to political content but publicly evaluate speaker credibility and performance, producing a “winner versus loser” narrative through collective evaluative practices. Using quantitative content analysis, the study examines 486 top comments. The analysis focuses on verbal appraisal, emoji use, and engagement metrics to assess how users evaluate and endorse the two main social actors. Findings reveal a strong asymmetry in audience response: Youssef is overwhelmingly endorsed through positive language, high engagement, and affective emojis, while Morgan is predominantly framed through criticism, and disbelief. These patterns suggest that YouTube’s participatory affordances facilitate audience-constructed symbolic authority, enabling users to collectively position Youssef as the rhetorical “winner” of the debate.