Populism has become a popular word in the political debate. However, its meaning and its connotations are unclear. This paper examines the use of the term populism in the Spanish print media and the consequences of a policy or political actor being labelled as populist. Our analyses draw on an original dataset of all newspaper articles containing the words populism and populist and were published between 2013 and 2017. Through a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model and the manual coding of a sample of these articles we explore the way in which the term is used, which actors it is associated with, and whether it involves negative or positive connotations. Based on the finding that the term is frequently used in a pejorative way, we conduct two survey experiments to assess the consequences of a policy or actor being labeled as populist. Results show that individuals are less likely to support a policy or political actor when it is labelled as populist and that the effects of the populist label are independent from the use of a populist rhetoric.