Right-wing populism in the news media: A cross-cultural study of journalist practices and news discourse

Background and focus

Right-wing populist parties have become increasingly prominent in European politics and public debate.

In a number of countries, these parties have achieved considerable success in both national elections and elections to the European Parliament. Although they differ in terms of their backgrounds and political profiles, they also share several distinctive characteristics. These include their way of appealing to “the people” and invoking the popular will; their preference for simple and radical solutions to societal problems; their criticism of the political establishment; and a nationalist ideology expressed through the portrayal of immigration as a serious threat to the nation.

Researchers have argued, with good reason, that the success and popularity of right-wing populist parties would not have been possible without substantial media influence and what has been described as media-adapted rhetoric.

It has also been argued that the media have created an environment that has been particularly favourable to populist politics. But how has journalism dealt with right-wing populism in news coverage? What characterises the news reports, interviews, and debates organised by the media?

Research in this area has been limited. The media are often attributed a central role, but journalism itself has rarely been studied in detail. In particular, there has been a lack of comparative studies.

In this study, we compared journalistic coverage of right-wing populism across different media in four countries: the United Kingdom (UKIP), France (Front National), Greece (Golden Dawn), and Sweden (Sweden Democrats).

Focus

The study focused on three challenges facing journalism.

1. The first concerned the risk that journalism followed a logic that was particularly favourable to political populism. Researchers had described this as media populism. This could involve journalism that shared populism’s focus on crises, controversies, and the shortcomings of those in power. It could also involve a tendency among the media to favour spectacular statements, deviations from what was expected, and clear-cut controversies—precisely the kind of content that populist parties provided. The study examined the relevance of these assumptions and how the rhetoric of right-wing populist parties was handled in news reporting.
2. The second challenge concerned how journalism should relate to the legitimacy of right-wing populism. Norms of impartiality guided much of journalism. Political news reporting was not expected to take a position for or against particular parties or opinions. But how were these norms applied to views that some considered extreme and racist? Impartial reporting also meant that certain views were accorded legitimacy. The project examined this on the basis of a theory of differences in journalistic norms depending on whether political issues were defined as legitimate controversies or as deviations (developed by Daniel Hallin). The right-wing populist parties themselves also moved between positions within the political mainstream and the extreme margins of political culture.
3. The third challenge facing journalism concerned the reporting of immigration issues, which right-wing populist parties had made central to their political profiles and which, for several reasons, had risen on the political agenda in recent years. A key question was how journalism could report on immigration without primarily reproducing discourses that fundamentally coincided with or benefited the rhetoric and political agenda of right-wing populism.

Aim

The project was designed to identify both general patterns in journalism and contextual variations.

Four countries were selected in which conditions differed with regard to political culture and the profiles of populist parties, the position of professional journalism, and the respective roles of public service and commercial news media.

The study covered journalism on television, in the press, and online; news and current affairs programmes; short news items and longer reports; as well as interviews and debates. Two datasets were collected. One covered the 2014 European Parliament election campaign, while the other covered current news events during 2016–2017.

The study applied discourse-analytical approaches. Journalistic practices were understood as social practices through which meaning was produced.

More specifically, different genres and subgenres were analysed. Discourses were identified through a combination of linguistic analyses at the micro and macro levels.

The analyses focused on how political appearances were staged; which frames and interpretations shaped news reporting and debates; how journalism positioned itself in relation to the politics being reported; and how issues such as immigration were discursively constructed.