The Far Right and the Media

This book examines how far-right politics and news media shape one another, exposing, contesting, and at times inadvertently legitimising white supremacist, violent misogynist, and other far-right ideas. It situates these dynamics within the economic and structural transformations associated with the neoliberal restructuring of media industries, demonstrating how commercial imperatives, audience capture, and shifts in journalistic practice intersect with deeper histories of inequality, coloniality, and exclusion to structure contemporary news environments. Drawing on research from Australia, the United States, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, the book analyses how newsroom routines and editorial practices interact with far-right strategies to influence coverage and, over time, recalibrate the parameters of public political debate. Case studies of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, the Christchurch terrorist attack, electoral breakthroughs in Iberia, and German reporting on "incel" online spaces show how the pursuit of immediacy, spectacle, and a narrow performance of balance can, for susceptible audiences, render far-right narratives increasingly visible and, in some contexts, implicitly legitimate. While the chapters do not offer sustained exemplars of alternative practice, they signpost the potential for a historically informed and critically engaged journalism to disrupt these dynamics and to produce more accurate, accountable, and contextually rigorous reporting on the far right. Integrating insights from media studies, political communication, and cultural sociology, this volume provides a theoretically grounded and empirically rich resource for scholars, journalists, activists, and policymakers. It offers conceptual and analytical tools for examining how far-right ideas gain traction in contemporary political discourse and how media practices might more effectively respond to and resist the political and social challenges presented by far-right mainstreaming.

Imogen Richards is a senior lecturer in criminology at Deakin University, Australia. Her research examines comparative forms of political violence, with a particular focus on the mediation of violence and its dynamics. Her solo and co-authored books include Neoliberalism and Neo-Jihadism (2020), Criminologists in the Media (2022), Global Heating and the Australian Far Right (2023), and The Aesthetic Politics of Far-Right Environmentalism (2025).

1. Introduction: media, democracy, and the global rise of the far right 2. The media and the mainstreaming of the far right: reporting, enabling or countering? 3. The role of the media in normalising the far right: evidence from Spain and Portugal 4. Racism, amplification, and mainstreaming: news media and the Australian far right 5. Media bias and political silos: how the American media covered the January 6 insurrection 6. How the mainstream media can challenge terrorist propaganda: a case study of the Christchurch terrorist 7. "Grim hallmarks": the far right, the media and the war in Gaza 8. The incel other: German media depiction of incels between misogynist terrorists and the 'Tatort' Appendices