Throughout my career I have struggled to know how to handle the dilemma of reporting organised racism. I have a family background that makes me fear brushing extremism under the carpet. But I also know that the political racists need the oxygen of mainstream media attention to build their profile. My LSE colleague Bart Cammaerts has researched widely into political extremism and the media, but he also has personal experience of a country where racist politics is much more popular and embedded in the mainstream. What lessons can we learn from places like Belgium?
Mainstream Media and the Extreme Right. What to Do?
Dr Bart Cammaerts, LSE
The current controversy surrounding the invitation of the BBC of a BNP representative to appear on their flagship show Question Time deserves a more thorough debate then it is getting at the moment.
The central question of this debate should be how the media as an institution and journalists as media professionals deal with an extreme right, post-fascist party such as the BNP. In this regard, it might be fruitful to have a look across the channel, where extreme right parties have been a significant political force for decades now.
In Belgium for instance, Vlaams Blok, now called Vlaams Belang, has increased its share of the vote (and of representatives) every election from 1991 until 2007, reaching at its prime almost 25% of the popular vole in the North of Belgium and 33% in a medium-sized city like Antwerp.
Political Quarantine
The reaction of democratic political parties was to unequivocally and unanimously reject any co-operation with the extreme right, not even with the view of submitting amendments. All democratic parties signed a protocol to that effect. This came to be known as the ‘cordon sanitaire’, in effect placing the extreme right in a political quarantine.
Although at times under debate, the cordon sanitaire remains intact, 18 years after it was signed. The media’s position towards the extreme right, however, was – to say the least – much more complicated and became ever more problematic the larger the extreme right became.
Despite calls from some, a ‘cordon médiatique’ never materialized and the mainstream media, commercial as well as public, increasingly provided a platform for the populist discourses of hate and division propagated by the extreme right.
Journalists Responsibilities
It is of course over-simplifying matters a bit, but there were (and still are) two main positions with regard to the media’s treatment of the extreme right and they are to some extent linked to different paradigms in thinking about the role of journalists in a democracy.
The first school, very much embedded in the liberal tradition, claims objectivity and impartiality and argues that the extreme right should be treated as any other political party and therefore it deserves adequate attention and exposure in the media in the same degree as any other party that holds more then 20% of the vote. Democracy is not served by excluding the voice of (a significant) part of the electorate from the public space and the common sense and critical watchdog role of the journalist counter-balances their extremism.
The second school finds its origins in social responsibility approaches and public journalism. They refute that the media can ever be objective and impartial and point to the social construction of news, discourses and frames, to the way protest is being covered or to the exclusion of other (left-wing) radical ideas from the mainstream. It is being foregrounded that the most important role of a journalist is to be a citizen first and foremost, rather then a neutral observer and to thus defend democracy against its enemies.
Legitimized Discourses
From this perspective, other rules should apply towards extreme right parties and their ideology. It is also often argued that sharing a platform with the extreme right partly legitimizes their discourses.
The liberal arguments won the fight in North Belgium and representatives of the extreme right started appearing regularly on the news, news shows, in election programmes, etc. Granting the extreme right a platform to disseminate their ideology proved to be a very slippery slope towards presenting them as legitimate political actors being good at their job of opposing the government. More and more representatives of the extreme right have gone through the same media training as democratic politicians and are quite savvy in grasping every opportunity to get their often vile messages across, in spite of über-critical interviewers.
In fact, representatives of extreme right parties often perform a sort of permanent underdog anti-politics that appeals to anti-establishment sentiments – an establishment to which the (liberally inclined) media elites are also considered part of.
Suppressed Voices
There are problems with both positions. The liberal answer ultimately often results in granting the extreme right an open platform, thereby normalizing and partly legitimizing racism and racist discourses in society in the process. Excluding them from (mainstream) public space, however, cultivates the underdog position in which the extreme right revels so comfortably and above all adds ammunition to the repeated claims of the extreme right that liberal democracy is inherently anti-democratic as it excludes and suppresses certain voices and ideas. Ideas on racial superiority, segregation and holocaust denial being prime examples of this for the extreme right.
In effect, the extreme right has for many years used the formal rules (and language) of democracy against democracy itself. Claiming the freedom of speech and expression with a view of silencing others.
I believe that extreme right parties should not be ignored altogether and the societal tensions and conflicts they are the symptom of, even less so. But the media should expose extreme right parties for what they really are and lay barren internal conflicts (just as with other parties) rather then give such parties and their representatives a platform to repeat their discourses of hate and exclusion.
Reporting The Right
Journalists should furthermore be very aware of the dangers of legitimizing extreme right discourses when reporting on the extreme right and when interviewing their representatives.
Pluralism should be radical in a democracy, but for vibrant multi-cultural and ethnical democracies to be able to survive, a common ground relating to basic values such as equality, respect, solidarity, difference, etc. is crucial as well. Popper’s paradox of tolerance sums it up pretty neatly, up until what point can intolerance be tolerated before it destroys tolerance all together?
Bart Cammaerts
Bart you have not mentioned one argument for letting the extremes (of left or right) have their say – it gives an opportunity to directly confront and refute their arguments which otherwise can thrive unchallenged.
In a new media age, the cordon sanitiare argument is pretty unsustainable. The BNP and the likes will get their message into the media and, inevitably, become part of the mainstream. We should be firm enough in our belief in democracy to expect its champions to confront and defeat the poison of the misguided and evil.
With a couple of provisos.
(i) The media must acknowledge that campaigns like the MPs’ expenses are deeply damaging to democracy. It’s a perfectly legitimate story, but not a saga played out in the cheapest possible language, bereft of nuance and perspective and all based on a sordid piece of chequebook journalism. Investigating what was going on this time last year at banks is a much bigger story – but too difficult to report?
(ii) The media must keep the BNP in perspective. Their electoral base is tiny, probably not much more than David Icke and his followers get. So they have a couple of councillors with zero power on a couple of councils? Reporting this like it’s the start of the Fourth Reich is just foolish, but it happens and the punter in the street, who knows nothing about local politics, sees the problem as pervasive and frightening, instead of absurd posturing.
PG Wodehouse created Roderick Spode in a rare moment of using his gifts for biting satire. He got it right. Keith Waterhouse would have found the words to do the same to Nick Griffin. Who’s going to do it now?
An interesting analysis, although I do wonder how compulsory voting in Belgium impacts the scene here (I’m a Brit resident in Belgium).
However my main question is this: you have laid out the issues, but you have sat on the fence on the Question Time issue. Were you editor of the programme, would you have invited Nick Griffin to participate on the panel?
One might reasonably assume that political views will follow a normal distribution with the large majority of citizens being decent people with a healthy respect for individual human rights. If this is so, why worry about the poison on offer from extreme right or extreme left? Other things being equal it will be mainly rejected and in any case self-cancelling.
These same citizens understand another zero-sum concept: that total rights and responsibilities necessarily equate to zero. The refusal of the politically active to acknowledge this self-evident zero sum is mathematically bizarre but eminently reflected in a Google search which offers hits in a ratio of 25:1 for rights and for responsibilities
There is undoubtedly a perception amongst many working people with salaries in the interquartile range that asserting rights and ignoring responsibilities is the guaranteed route to positive discrimination in terms of housing, financial support, university places etc. We can, of course, just flip the words rights, responsibilities and positive to their antonyms.
Most people favour giving people a hand up but there is a barely concealed resentment amongst many at what they see as trans-generational discrimination in favour of people who are not deprived but just irresponsible. Combine this with a reluctance of the major parties to convey any coherent strategies on the issue and we have lush pastures for a poisonous far right. Winning the argument will not be just about issues of media exposure!
Thanks for the comments. I absolutely agree that fighting fascism and extreme right ideologies is about much more then media exposure, democratic parties must address the often very genuine tensions and conflicts which make citizens vote for an extreme right populist party. Besides this, indeed the compulsory voting system in Belgium does make that a lot of protest or anti votes automatically go to the extreme right (although there is now a populist democratic alternative on the right, which has creamed off many votes from the extreme right at the latest elections).
I probably didn’t make my argument entirely clear with regards to Queston Time as such. I would not invite the BNP on Question Time, but I would make a programme about racism, about the conflicts and frustrations that make it appealing to vote for the BNP and then challenge representatives of democratic parties to provide democratic answers to these societal problems and tensions, rather then giving a platform to a BNP representative and thereby legitimising their hollow discourses.
Is it necessary to engage directly with the extreme right to challenge and refute their ‘arguments’? I don’t think so, just read their propaganda, read political history, provide context, etc. The problem with giving the extreme right a platform is that they know it doesn’t matter if they are refuted or ridiculed, the mere fact of being on such a program is already enough and the message just has to be repeated and repeated. Besides that, as I mentioned in my piece, journalists are also considered by many voters of extreme right parties part of the problem, part of the establishment, preventing them to ‘say things as they really are’. Journalists often think that they are smart and will be able to outwit the extreme right, expose their contradictions etc., but that is a very rational approach, while the extreme right plays on emotion and nationalist passions.
Bart – many thanks for the clarification! Most appreciated…
Bart – I wouldn’t invite the BNP on to Question Time because it would become a circus and that can only be to their advantage.
The role of the media in refuting the extreme right is only partially in exposing them – it’s also in supporting those who prevent an alternative stand, even if that is an establishment stand. Provoking popular disenchantment with mainstream politics (and listen to the phone-in shows with caller after caller saying, “I won’t vote – they are all as bad as each other” which is one step short of the BNP protest vote in many cases) is irresponsible in the same way as sympathetically reporting extreme right viewpoints.
The intentions are different, but the result is the same – bolstering the BNP vote.
Poppers Paradox comes up against the BNP Paradox ;
At what point does the so called ‘defence of tolerance’ tip into the point where the rhetoric of tolerance is used to disguise the fact that tolerance has itself become intolerance and has destroyed tolerance all together ?
Enoch Powell wrote that ‘ The new fascism will be anti-fascism’, and today it seems that the Liberal Fascists seek to depict their intolerance as a defence of tolerance.
The fact that the proposition that our socities are so unstable that a single stray soundbite from a ‘fascist’ politician may cause a fascist uprising is itself evidence of the fact that liberalism itself can only prevent fascism by becoming fascism.
When the liberal fascists adopt the methodology fascism in order to prevent an fascist uprising whose existence in society has been caused by them ( the BNP have not been responsible for creating the conditions for fascism in our society – the liberals have as our liberal society is their creation ) then it is liberalism that is the fascism we should fear – for it has created the conditions for fascism whilst becoming fascist itself.
In reality the rhetoric that our society is so weak that fascism could arise because of free speech is a condemnation of liberalism itself – though of course liberal fascists would never admit that.
WOW! You know you’ve made it when you manage to attract the likes of Lee John Barnes (LLB Hons), the BNP’s very own legal “expert”. He’s legally sane, by the way. He has his own appreciation society in antifascist circles. Here’s their website:
http://weloveleebarnes.blogspot.com/
Interesting quote above allegedly from Enoch Powell: “The new fascism will be anti-fascism”. I’ve seen this phrase attributed to Churchill, but cannot find the source of it. Any ideas? I’m at: ralph at fram dot ndo dot co dot uk.
I remember reading over sixty years ago that Huey Long, populist governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, was asked whether fascism would ever come the the United States. His reply was; “Sure it will, only we will call it anti-fascism.”