This year, a series of rallies organised by neo-Nazi groups in Australian cities sparked public outrage and concern about the extreme right.

Yet, some media coverage of the rallies downplayed the role neo-Nazis played in what they called “anti-immigration rallies”. Other commentators misrepresented statistics on net migration.

Politicians, meanwhile, traded barbs about who was to blame for far-right demonstrators on city streets.

In the United States, there was a similarly muddled response to a recent scandal involving genocidal, racist text messages among young Republican leaders.

The messages included racist slurs, praise for Adolf Hitler and jokes about gas chambers. Yet, Vice President JD Vance dismissed them as “edgy, offensive jokes” and called the backlash “pearl clutching”.

The scandal did have repercussions for the Young Republicans, and some senior Republican leaders did condemn the messages. But the fact Vance and others could even think to minimise such vile language speaks to the way far-right politics and sentiments have been normalised today – especially by some in the mainstream media.

As detailed in a book I recently edited, The Far Right and the Media: International Trends and Perspectives, mainstream journalism does not simply cover far-right politics from a critical distance, it also helps define what counts as politically acceptable.

And in many ways, the media is failing in this regard.

Euphemisms and evasion

The first problem has to deal with language itself. When describing the far right, some media outlets reach for softening descriptors such as “populist”, “controversial” or “anti-establishment”, avoiding more accurate terms like “racist” or “authoritarian”.

These linguistic choices are not merely stylistic; they also determine how audiences interpret events and understand what is politically at stake.

Studies of Spanish and Portuguese media have shown, for example, how journalists labelled far-right parties such as VOX and Chega as simply “conservative”, rarely acknowledging their ideological roots in racial nationalism.

In Germany, reporting on the misogynist incel movement has frequently reduced gendered violence to a matter of individual pathology instead of linking it to broader ideological networks of the far right.

In Australia, the mainstream media often treats racialised fears about demographic “threats” as legitimate national concerns.

For example, some commentary has suggested immigration will hurt “Australia’s way of life” or “provoke more internal hostility”. This is frequently framed as a neutral worry about the country’s future.

Yet, this framing overlooks how such claims draw on historical, settler-colonial logic that has cast both First Nations peoples and non-white migrants as populations to be controlled or contained.

When spectacle replaces substance

Sensationalist media coverage of far-right groups can also ensure their views are amplified. And far-right actors have long understood how to manipulate the media by provoking outrage, knowing such acts guarantee attention.

Under commercial pressure, news outlets often take the bait, producing stories that inflate the significance of far-right agitation while neglecting the deeper social and economic conditions that sustain discriminatory politics.

This, in turn, helps to normalise hateful rhetoric.

Research from Loughborough University illustrated this dynamic during the United Kingdom’s 2024 election campaign. Far-right Reform leader Nigel Farage was the third-most-covered political figure, despite his party’s limited electoral prospects. The volume of attention far outweighed his political relevance at the time.

Reform UK was also the only political party to feature in more “good” news than “bad”, the study found.

In this way, visibility achieved through sensationalism can function as a proxy for legitimacy.

False balance and the illusion of neutrality

This emphasis on spectacle over substance is compounded by another long-standing journalistic practice: the performance of balance.

Some media outlets feel compelled to bring balance to stories about those with far-right views by including their denials, justifications or attempts to distract.

In the US, this is the product of decades of industry restructuring. The Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was formative in this transformation. Not only did it create a path for explicitly partisan media outlets to emerge, it also encouraged mainstream organisations to perform neutrality through superficial “both-sides” reporting.

The coverage of the Young Republicans clearly illustrates this. Rather than examining how racism became embedded within party youth networks, some reporting drew parallels with violent text messages sent by a Democratic candidate for attorney-general in Virginia.

Other media outlets quoted White House officials seeking to divert attention to the Democrats in the same way – in the name of balance.

This reduced the Young Republicans scandal to just another partisan talking point, instead of a moment of reckoning.

Rethinking the media’s role

Through these ways of framing stories, media institutions have functioned as active, if often ambivalent, participants in shaping far-right visibility, rather than as passive conduits exploited by opportunistic actors.

What’s necessary – and entirely possible – is coverage that accurately describes far-right ideology for what it is, situates it within historical and social contexts, and resists the privileging of spectacle over substance.

Only by understanding these dynamics can news organisations begin to counter the forces they so often, however unintentionally, help to sustain.

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