On the Brown-Mondon Study of Media Mainstreaming of the Far Right

Some years ago Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon published a study of the use of the term "populist" by the news media, focusing on a quantitative and qualitative examination of the term's usage by the Guardian newspaper. They came to the conclusion that the newspaper's coverage, which they held to be characteristic of the media as a whole in the relevant respects, entailed a "deflection" of attention to the political realities behind "populist" movements, specifically the extent to which the "populist" movement is in fact elite-led, for elite-led purposes; a "euphemisation" and "trivialization" of the extremist views of these movements, using the word "populist" when the terms "far right" or "racist" would be far more accurate descriptors; and "amplification" of the importance of many such movements, making them seem larger and more important than they are. The result of this combination of deflection, euphemization/trivialization (normalization?) and amplification is that altogether the media routinely makes an elite-led, far right movement, perhaps rather a small and marginal one, out to be a genuinely grass-roots, popular, "populist" movement whose politics are essentially innocuous and unthreatening, its support vast and its importance great--a false representation which enables those movements to become as important as they pretend to be because this fools people into thinking they are genuinely bottom-up, and unthreatening, and important, such that they are worth following, or for others less sympathetic, at best a force with which they must come to terms, at every turn, as the title of their study had it, "mainstreaming" these movements.

I found the study highly persuasive as a description of what the media has been doing in regard to such movements--to the point that "populist" these days can seem to mean "billionaire, or senior functionary of a global financial house, who parlayed spewing racist poison into high office." However Brown and Mondon, if acknowledging the economic advantages of the right in regard to the shaping of the media's message, and the extension of this influence in regard to non-right-wing outlets which must fear its flak, had less to say of why the mainstream media should do so in the relentless manner that it does, with the center-left Guardian, whose relatively liberal-left politics they specifically note as making it that much more noteworthy a center of the tendency, most certainly included in that.

Reading their study it seems to me that this is very consistent with their being a center-left publication--the designation indicating that they are "center" first and "left" second (or more often, twenty-ninth). After all, as I have argued again and again, the center is deeply conservative and anti-leftist first and foremost, and what goes with that, not really afraid of the right. Indeed, the center's usual response to right-wing extremism is to downplay it--exemplified by how the center's knee-jerk response to utterance of the word "fascism" or any of its derivatives has the center going on the attack against those who used it, rather than taking a look at the rightist tendency which they have charged with being fascist; how in going on the attack the centrist engages in the most blatantly bad faith hair-splitting about the meaning of the term "fascism" in a manner that easily comes across as trying to define the word out of existence; how the center teaches people to react to reference to fascists, racists, far-rightists and the rest by rolling their eyes as if to say "There goes the loony left again!" (Even when they're talking about Mussolini himself.) There is, too, the center's extreme hostility to anyone's probing past the surfaces of sociological phenomena; and in particular their hostility to anyone pointing out the hard facts of societal structure that give elites power; which has its reflection in the centrist, in the most Orwellian manner, describes what everyone plainly sees to be oligarchy as "democracy," and elite decision-making toward which the rest of the population is hostile, or apathetic, as "consensus," all as they dismiss anyone who thinks that power is unequally distributed in society, that elites are capable of saying one thing and doing another, and that they are ever self-serving, as "conspiracy theorists" (instead of the "loony left," just plain loony).

The result is that when a movement of the right presents itself to the centrist media as "grass roots," "populist" and significant, as not at all elite-led or extremist or marginal but bottom-up, popular, important, the centrist media takes them at their word. If they do not call themselves right or far right, the media does not either, and if they deny that they are racist, then that is good enough for the media folks we are talking about, who certainly will not get into the way in which apparent grass roots may actually be astroturf, as they afford these movements lots and lots of space in their publications and on their web sites, and lots of time on their shows. Equally they respond to the suggestions of the left that the truth may be otherwise with a contempt so complete that the left is apt to be shut out of the dialogue altogether. So has the center acted ever since assuming its shape as an Anti-Communist force in the early days of the Cold War, and so has it gone on doing ever since.

I leave it to the reader to judge for themselves what effect this has had on the trajectory of political life in America and the Western world since.