How Liberal Press Norms Are Challenged by the Radical Right

• In Event: Party Communications and Agenda Setting

Abstract

How Liberal Press Norms are Challenged by the Radical Right: Revisiting the Indexing Hypothesis

Within increasingly digitalized and networked media systems, the free flow of information among politicians, media, and the public has paradoxically facilitated the promotion of illiberal ideologies that undermine democratic values and hinder public sphere consensus-building (Bennett & Kneuer, 2023; Bennett & Livingston, 2018). While much has been written about this, we examine another path through which illiberal ideas can reach large publics: via the election of radical right parties that challenge news organizations to report disinformation and illiberal positions as reflections of the democratic process.

This paper argues that the traditional journalistic “indexing process” of selecting voices and views in the news depended importantly on the background commitments of politicians, parties, press, and citizens to liberal communication norms such as tolerance, forbearance, and acceptance of political outcomes (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2019). This liberal consensus was reinforced by journalism norms that apportioned voices and views according to a combination of party electoral representation and the perceived situational power of different political actors in policy decisions and issue debates. There were, of course, blind spots when parties and politicians engaged in deceptive framing or intimidation of opponents (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston, 2008). However, we now see a more worrisome problem for democratic press systems with the electoral success of radical right parties that challenge the mainstream press to report their illiberal views, turning indexing against its own liberal foundations.

We suggest that despite the continued liberal leanings of many mainstream press organizations, they may be trapped by their own norms to give disproportionate coverage to relatively small minority parties that have little power in specific news situations. This is because even when far-right parties are small and removed from power, they can make news via disruptions of more centrist (particularly center-right conservative) parties that suffer conflicts over repositioning themselves against loss of votes to competitors from the right. Although center-party upheavals and repositioning seldom achieve the desired ends of preventing vote leakage (Abou-Chadi et al., 2022), these disruptions of party systems are perceived as newsworthy by journalists who often attribute the problem to radical right parties, thus bringing them and their issues more prominently into the news.

Our study explores these dynamics with the case of an immigration issue in Germany involving government support for the 2018 UN Global Compact for Migration (GCM), on which the radical right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had taken a position derived from its most extreme supporter networks (Klinger et al., 2022). Even though the German government led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Chancellor Angela Merkel was in no danger of failing to endorse the UN initiative, aspiring party leaders and Merkel successors feared loss of voter support to the AfD over the issue. The intra-party split challenged Merkel’s issue leadership, making it a salient news story. Our content analysis of over 600 articles from six premier German news outlets shows that the AfD and its issue framing were brought far more prominently into the news than would ordinarily be expected under conventional indexing assumptions. This mechanism of “instigated indexing” exaggerates radical right presence in the mainstream public sphere by amplifying extremist views that civic and journalism norms would normally avoid publicizing.


Works Cited:

Abou-Chadi, T., Cohen, D., & Wagner, M. (2022). The centre-right versus the radical right: The role of migration issues and economic grievances. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(2), 366–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1853903

Bennett, W. L., Lawrence, R. G., & Livingston, S. (2008). When the press fails: Political power and the news media from Iraq to Katrina. University of Chicago Press.

Bennett, W. L., & Kneuer, M. (2023). Communication and democratic erosion: The rise of illiberal public spheres. European Journal of Communication, 02673231231217378. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231231217378

Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139.

Klinger, U., Lance Bennett, W., Knüpfer, C. B., Martini, F., & Zhang, X. (2022). From the fringes into mainstream politics: Intermediary networks and movement-party coordination of a global anti-immigration campaign in Germany. Information, Communication & Society, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2050415

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2019). How democracies die. Crown.

Authors

• Ulrike Klinger, European University Viadrina

• Curd Benjamin Knüpfer, University of Southern Denmark

• Lance Bennett, University of Washington, Seattle