Modular messaging and multimodal influence amidst democratic fragility in Greece: unpacking New Democracy’s party–funded media network

This article examines how New Democracy’s party-funded media ecosystem in Greece organises multimodal campaigning through a division of rhetorical labour between static cartoons and online video. Focusing on the network linking the Truth Team and the news-style outlet Ellada24, it analyses 150 Ellada24 cartoons and 50 Truth Team YouTube videos collected between January 2021 and July 2025. Social semiotic analysis and thematic coding, integrated via cross-modal matrices, trace how framing functions are allocated across formats. The study identifies a Threat Module, in which static cartoons construct existential menaces by racialising migrants, stigmatising minorities and dramatising external enemies, and an Attack Module, in which short video clips personalise conflict, ridicule opponents and repair the governing party’s reputation. The ecosystem’s organisational architecture includes the consultancy Blue Skies S.A., which has received party payments and public contracts, complicating boundaries between party-linked communication, public resources, and news-style presentation. The article introduces ‘division of rhetorical labour’ as an analytic tool for understanding how party-funded ecosystems assign distinct framing tasks to media with specific communicative affordances and regulatory environments. It suggests how such segmented organisation of content may interact with fragmented oversight in fragile democracies.