Best of 2025 - How media coverage helps normalise the far right |
Media coverage does more than report on the far right. Through language choices, sensationalism and false balance, journalism can help shift racist politics into the mainstream.
A repost from 5 December 2025
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........