In an era of proliferating news discourse and growing distrust of establishment institutions, journalists face a double bind: they need to embrace the digital world to maintain and attract audiences and keep up to speed with news flows across social networks, while at the same time they must work to distinguish their profession, their product, and their outlets from knowledge rivals. To live up to this challenge, journalists employ a range of discursive techniques. One such technique focuses attention on the linguistic performance of people in the news and associates types of language use with types of speakers. To tie down this aspect of mediatization to specific contexts of use, I analyze how journalists recontextualize political (mis)communication and show how journalistic metadiscourse formulates acceptable and unacceptable interactional styles in the public sphere. I argue that in this project, politicians are both allies and rivals to journalists. Allies, because their public performance is geared to wards the demands of media logic. Rivals, because politicians resent journalists encroaching on their territory.