Populism and media policy failure

The ‘parade of the aghast’

One of the explanations for the rise in prominence of populist challenges to centrist political forces has focused on the former’s effective use of the media: their ability to transmit ‘sentiment’ over ‘fact’, to use ‘authentic’ language, to make full use of social media and to exploit the mainstream media’s appetite for sensationalist stories. ‘All neo-populist movements’, argues Gianpetro Mazzoleni (2003), ‘rely heavily on some kind of indirect (and direct) complicity with the mass media, and all are led by politicians who, with few exceptions, are shrewd and capable “newsmakers” themselves’ (p. 6). In Europe and North America, this has worked to the advantage of iconoclastic far right politicians like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage who have all received extensive airtime in which they have combined nativist rhetoric with outbursts against the political establishment (no matter how privileged they themselves may be). A dangerous cocktail of tabloid values, falling levels of trust in the media and unaccountable tech power (facilitating the spread of hyper-partisan and sometimes ‘fake’ news) is widely seen to be intimately linked to the rise in recent years both of a xenophobic populism and polarised media and political environments (Barnett, 2017; Benkler et al., 2017; Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2017).

Yet, the political earthquakes of Trump and Brexit were greeted with astonishment and confusion by some of the most prestigious names in mainstream journalism who had, to use a popular expression, misread the tea-leaves. Trump’s victory, for example, ‘was the night that wasn’t supposed to happen, that had almost no chance of happening’ opined the public editor of The New York Times (Spayd, 2016), while her bosses, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr and editor Dean Baquet (2016), admitted that ‘[a]fter such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?’ Reporters at Politico were blunt:

We were more than wrong. We were laughably oblivious. The entre Washington political-media complex missed the mark. Not by inches or feet, but by miles …. There will be plenty of time to dissect it all. The joke is on us. (Palmer and Sherman, 2016)

The joke wasn’t just confined to the United States: for Jon Snow (2017), the veteran presenter of Channel Four News, the British media ‘failed, not only over the [Brexit] Referendum, but perhaps over reporting Europe at all down the 40 years of the UK’s membership. Amid the fresh mown lies (or fake news) of the campaign itself, we didn’t have a chance’.

Elite journalism, however, largely recused itself from any direct responsibility for events such as Trump and Brexit and instead embarked on what some journalists described as a period of self-reflection: to ‘think hard about the half of America the paper too seldom covers’ according to The New York Times’ Spayd (2016) and, for Sulzberger and Baquet (2016), to ‘rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism …. to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly’. Modest changes have been made: mastheads have been amended (e.g. The Washington Post’s ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’) and mission statements revised, such as The Guardian editor’s promise relentlessly to ‘challenge the economic assumptions of the last three decades, which have extended market values such as competition and self-interest far beyond their natural sphere and seized the public realm’ (Viner, 2017). In addition, robust ‘anti-populist’ editorial stances have been widely adopted as demonstrated by The New York Times’ decision to publicly denounce Trump as a ‘liar’ and the tidal wave of anti-Trump coverage across liberal broadcast and print news outlets in response to his presidency (Patterson, 2017). While this strategy has been good for business – there has been a spike in subscriptions following the election of Trump and Brexit to outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and The Guardian together with rising viewing figures for CNN and MSNBC (Doctor, 2017) – it is less clear how effective this will be in holding reactionary populism to account. For example, the US journalist Thomas Frank (2017) has described ‘Trump denunciation’ as ‘a parade of the aghast’ in which ‘all the skills of the journalist [have been] reduced to a performance of perturbation and disgust’, a situation that does little either to undermine Trump himself or to discover the roots of the problems that may have engineered his election success.

Similarly, little attention has been paid to the structural conditions that underlie what Victor Pickard (2018) calls the ‘misinformation society’ and of the ‘commercial imperatives [that] drove news organizations to popularise a dangerous politics’ (p. 195). In particular, there has been scant critical examination of the policy actions (and inactions) that have facilitated environments in which the coverage of populist leaders and narratives is not simply profitable but the logical outcome of media markets in liberal democracies that are wedded to ratings and controversy. Minor editorial changes and software updates are hardly likely to compensate for the systemic degeneration of communication systems in which power has been increasingly consolidated by oligopolistic digital intermediaries and media giants, in which liberal news media have failed sufficiently to address the roots of polarisation, in which public media have increasingly been identified not as monitors but as embodiments of elite power and finally, in which highly partisan right-wing media have been emboldened and rewarded.

In this combustible context, this article reflects on the implication for media systems of liberal conceptions of right-wing populism that see it as a threat to ‘reason’ and social order as well as to consensual and ‘objective’ journalism. From this ‘anti-populist’ perspective, ‘mediated populism’ can be seen as an example of ‘policy failure’ yet the underlying reasons for this failure, and especially the idea that we might want to consider fresh policy options that would foster more diverse and democratic media environments, are all too often ignored. This article does not claim that this failure has led to the rise of right-wing populism nor does it claim that there is a media policy ‘solution’ to the populist surge. Instead, it argues that existing liberal approaches to media policy have contributed to highly unequal and distorted communication systems that have been exploited by forces on the far right and that need to be corrected as part of a broader challenge to right-wing populism. These failings in media systems have previously been explained by concepts such as ‘policy failure’ (Pickard, 2014), ‘regulatory failure’ (Horwitz, 1989) and ‘media policy silences’ (Freedman, 2014), but they are just as relevant to contemporary spaces in which ‘misinformation’ thrives and xenophobia and white nationalism are able to find their voice.

This article focuses largely on examples from the United States and the United Kingdom not because they epitomise some sort of undifferentiated ‘global populism’ (see Chakravartty and Roy, 2017 for a fascinating account of ‘mediatised populisms’ across the Inter-Asian region; see also Artz, 2017, for an equally interesting collection of essays on populist media policies across Latin America) but because, since the 1980s, they have provided some of the earliest and most visible examples of an emerging market-oriented communications policy paradigm characterised, according to Van Cuilenberg and McQuail (2003), by a susceptibility to ‘[p]ragmatism and populism’ (p. 197). Of course there is an enormous difference between the hypercommercial US media, the mixed ecology of the United Kingdom and far more regulated Scandinavian media systems but none of them are insulated from the market pressures and technological affordances that are re-writing contemporary political communications landscapes. This article first poses a particular way of framing populism, considers the strengths and weaknesses of theories of ‘mediated populism’ and then identifies four areas of ‘policy failure’ that have nurtured highly skewed media environments in which far right perspectives have been widely amplified. This article concludes with a call to devise a new policy paradigm based around redistribution that aims to reconstruct media systems in order both to resist both state and market capture and to undermine the appeal of populist forces on the far right.

Populism as policy failure

Without wishing to add to the ‘terminological chaos’ that, according to Cas Mudde (2007: 12) marks the scholarship on populism, this article seeks less to define right-wing populism than to understand it from the perspective of some of its harshest critics from the political centre: as an existential threat to liberal democracy. True, there do appear to be some common tropes that circumscribe populism as a specific type of political phenomenon: its ‘anti-pluralism’(Mueller, 2016), its appeal to a ‘pure people’ in opposition to a ‘corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2007: 23), its ‘anti-status quo dimension’ (Panizza, 2005: 3), its distinct and vernacular ‘political style’ (Moffitt, 2016) and finally, as I have already noted, its dependence on ‘media action’ (Mazzoleni, 2008: 50). What I am most interested in, however, is the extent to which contemporary populism is condemned as a form of ‘illiberal democracy’ – as class- and identity-based movements that seek to mobilise ‘resistance to moderate, centrist or established political elites from both sides of the political spectrum’ (International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2017: 46).

Far right populism, understood in these terms, is not just as a challenge to representative forms of democracy but – especially given its recent electoral successes – as evidence of a more profound breakdown of the ‘centre ground’. In this sense, it can be conceptualised as a type of ‘market failure’ arising out of the inability of liberal politics to cater effectively to all tastes and demographics by over-representing those people whose interests it deems to be most ‘lucrative’ (e.g. middle-class voters who are seen as low risk) and marginalising those who are more ‘expensive’ to seek out (those who are seen to be ‘high risk’ such as the poor and the marginalised). This is similar to the sorts of market failure generated in a range of industries (including the media) which then require particular kinds of corrective policy actions, not least to address the ‘information asymmetries’ (Stiglitz, 1998: 13) and unwelcome externalities (of which right-wing populism is clearly one) that distort the production and allocation of goods. Liberal democracy appears to be suffering from the same set of problems: it has super-served elites and under-served minorities and the poor (Piketty, 2014) while fostering a polarised and asymmetrical public sphere (Benkler et al., 2017); its adherents across Western Europe and North America have implemented austerity programmes that both intensify inequality and roll back the traditional welfarist ‘market failure’ policies that might help to ameliorate the pain (if not, of course, to address its underlying causes) (Blyth, 2013). Populists, meanwhile, have been very quick to take advantage of this market failure by reaching out to those individuals and groups whose interests do not lie within this narrowly defined liberal market consensus and by attempting to represent their cultural and economic anxieties. Neoliberalism may not the sole cause of contemporary populisms, but it has certainly intensified the economic and cultural tensions on which far right populists have been quick to prey.

This ‘dismissal’ of populism by liberal elites is, according to Ernesto Laclau (2005), ‘part of the discursive construction of a certain normality, of an ascetic political universe from which its dangerous logics had to be excluded’ (p. 19). For Laclau (2005), this involves not simply the elite’s fear of rowdy crowds and dissenting publics, but also its denigration of populism’s simplistic, binarized operating system as ‘irrational and undefinable’ (p. 16). In this context, liberal democracy’s failure to address the underlying grievances caused by neoliberal policies that have increased inequality and diminished the public sphere (Brown, 2015) has provided fertile ground for the right-wing populism that is the focus of this article. Populism’s opacity and the ‘emptiness’ of its political symbols (Laclau, 2005: 12) mean that it is ripe for exploitation by competing political forces with very different attitudes towards sovereignty, democracy and indeed the very construction of the ‘people’. However, I am less interested here in how different kinds of populists have battled for influence so much as whether existing pluralist media policy paradigms have contributed to conditions in which, in particular, illiberal political forces have been able to thrive. If populism is indeed, at least in part, a response to the failure of the liberal political market to cater for all citizens, then to what extent has this failure been facilitated by contemporary media policy environments and with what consequences?

The rise of ‘mediated populism’

I have already referred to a growing literature that argues that a central precondition for the ability of populist movements to challenge the hegemony of centrist parties struggling with issues of legitimacy and trust is their ability to communicate the anger and emotion that will resonate with disaffected publics. Far right populist parties have been especially successful in winning coverage of their appeals to what Alvares and Dahlgren (2016) describe as core populist tropes: ‘an idealised sense of historical nation and (often ethnic) community – “the people,” as well as a critical stance towards “the elites”’. (p. 49) Ruth Wodak (2013) argues that right-wing populist parties are actually dependent on ‘performance strategies in modern media democracies’ (p. 27) and insists that their growth is dependent on visibility generated by the media. According to Gianpetro Mazzoleni (2015), media organisations are complicit with populist movements in what he describes as ‘mediated populism’, defined as ‘the outcome of the close connection between media-originated dynamics and the rise of populist sentiments’ (p. 376). It is thus increasingly difficult to imagine ‘unmediated’ forms of populism in any part of the world with ‘mediated populisms’ apparent not simply in Europe and North America but in India (Chakravartty and Roy, 2015), Indonesia (McCargo, 2016) and across Latin America (Waisbord, 2011).

Tabloid media, especially sensitive to market imperatives and often adept at using vernacular language, are often seen as key vehicles for the circulation and normalisation of populist ideas. Mazzoleni (2008: 59–62) maps out a ‘media-market life-cycle’ of populist movements in which tabloid media amplify anti-elite sentiment in an initial ‘ground-paying phase before bowing to the allure of populist leaders in a later ‘insurgent’ phase – precisely what we saw with the endless attention given to Trump, Farage, Le Pen and Modi during their respective election campaigns. This is followed by a more tense relationship when populist parties become more established and thus less of a sensational news story and, finally, a period of decline when the initial excitement generated by populist iconoclasm has long disappeared.

Elite media, described by Mazzoleni (2008) as ‘the mouthpieces of the ruling classes’ (p. 51), have a rather more complicated relationship to populist movements but they are equally central to the legitimation of right-wing populist ideas. According to Mazzoleni (2008), elite media ignore populists at first and then respond to their insurgency ‘by adopting tones of outrage and ridicule’ (p. 61) – precisely the ‘aghastness’ referred to earlier by Thomas Frank. Yet, the established news media are by no means immune to the commercial and ideological sheen of right-wing populism and ‘can display an unprecedented deference to populist parties that have gained power’ (Mazzoleni, 2008: 61). Of course, this is not always the case – witness their opposition to Trump in the United States – but the establishment’s ‘sacerdotal’ attitude to power often leads to illiberal political forces receiving ‘compliant media treatment’ (Mazzoleni, 2008: 61) from liberal media outlets who pave the way for the normalisation of populist agendas on, for example, topics such as immigration and crime (Hall et al., 2013).

While Mazzoleni’s analysis certainly appears to fit the pattern of coverage of far right parties in a whole range of European countries, there are perhaps two key problems associated with this understanding of ‘mediated populism’.

The first concerns the elevation of ‘media logic’ above other factors in explaining both the construction and normalisation of far right movements. Although Mazzoleni (2008) insists that he is not making any ‘causal links between the media and the spread of populism’ (p. 50), he nevertheless argues that media are inseparable from populism as it emerges in any specific context, generating ‘media parties’ and giving ‘status’ to what were previously dissident discourses. The danger is that by fetishising the role of the media, we run the risk of underestimating the significance of the broader political factors that play a key role in cementing the appeal of right-wing populist parties: alienation from elite institutions, cultural and economic insecurities and nativist opposition to immigration.

A second problem with traditional accounts of ‘mediated populism’ is their failure to consider media environments as products of policy action (and inaction). While some scholars certainly do talk about the structural factors of media systems that pertain to the opportunities for populists to be widely publicised (Berry and Sobieraj, 2013; Kramer, 2014; Pickard, 2018), much of the literature on mediated populism remains aloof from policy debates and, therefore, from the possibility of policy change. Mazzoleni (2008: 62), for example, argues that populism ‘has its origins in the typical patterns and practices of commercial media outlets’, but he fails even to acknowledge that these ‘patterns and practices’ are the products of specific media policy environments and decisions. Given the salience of social media platforms in providing populists with additional means with which to communicate with supporters above and beyond traditional media, it is even more vital to reflect on the policies that have shaped the broader communications landscape and potentially contributed to the normalisation of far right ideas. Media ecologies characterised by high degrees of polarisation, falling levels of trust, weakened public service remits and oligopolistic structures all have recent histories that are at least partly explained by the choices made by specific policy actors. To what extent is ‘mediated populism’ the product not just of ‘complicit’ communication channels but, more specifically, of policy regimes that have generated communicative climates that the far right have been able to exploit?

Media policy failures

Our communications systems are not in any sense ‘natural’ but created in the shape of the vested interests that dominate at any one time; communications policy is a highly political, value-laden, interest-driven field of decision-making. Since the 1980s, this has generally followed ‘the logic of the marketplace’ (Van Cuilenberg and McQuail, 2003: 200), whereby decision makers have been in thrall to rhetorics concerning innovation, efficiency and consumer sovereignty. Under the guide of neoliberalism (Freedman, 2008) or ‘corporate libertarianism’ (Pickard, 2014), communications markets have been restructured better to enhance corporate accumulation and to inscribe a commercial logic ever deeper into the cultural field.

Yet, this policy restructuring is executed not simply through visible and identifiable legislative or regulatory acts but often through flawed decision-making processes that remove certain issues – notably those concerning concentrations of media power – from the policy agenda. Thus, we have ‘media policy silences’ (Freedman, 2014) and ‘media policy failures’ (Pickard, 2014: 216) characterised by ‘inaction’ and ‘invisibility’ and often caused by the ideological affinity between and mutual interests of policymakers, regulators and industry voices. This underlies the ‘regulatory failure’ that Robert Horwitz (1989) describes as taking place when ‘a captured agency systematically favors the private interests of regulated parties and systematically ignores the public interest’ (p. 29). I argue that a series of media policy failures and silences in relation to four areas in particular have taken place in Europe and North America in the last three decades that have further distorted our communications landscapes and undermined their ability to act as counterweights to the rise in recent years of parties and movements on the right.

Conclusion: Towards a new policy paradigm

Media policy failures did not cause the rise of Trump, the Alternative for Germany, the People’s Party in Austria or indeed Brexit. Those have other structural causes related to legacies of racism, experiences of insecurity and disenchantment with a political system that rewards people so unequally. What is remarkable, however, is the extent to which those most contemptuous of right-wing populism’s anti-elite narratives are so reluctant to acknowledge their own complicity in facilitating the discursive and material conditions they now seek to oppose. This is as true for media elites as it is true for other areas of political life. Liberal media policies have been unable to lay the basis for independent, critical and representative media systems that would articulate and respond to the very diverse sets of concerns that citizens have in their respective environments. Policy silences paved the way for the emergence of powerful and yet unaccountable digital intermediaries through whose channels travels the ‘fake news’ widely believed by mainstream politicians and commentators to have corrupted democratic politics. Policy silences smoothed the path for the implantation of commercial values throughout our communications systems, unshackling conceptions of the public interest from corporate responsibility so that poisonous coverage of refugees and other minorities is entirely legitimate and constitutionally protected while far right populist figures litter news bulletins because a business logic demands it.

These policy silences are intensified by a regulatory failure to challenge the intimacy of governments and media executives – a familiarity which further contaminates democratic societies and simply hands ammunition to far right populists who are then able to attack mainstream media as representatives of elite power. Liberal media policy with its commitment to market forces, its privileging of corporate speech rights, its complicity with the establishment and its technocratic obsession for innovation ahead of the public interest is therefore severely implicated in the growth of those reactionary movements that it is now affronted by. It has achieved this not by advocating or protecting populist actors but by repeatedly failing to produce conditions in which a representative and pluralistic public media could be sustained.

If centrist politicians and mainstream media really wished to remove the conditions in which anti-democratic forces are able to grow, they would acknowledge that is time for radically new communications policies – not solutions to right-wing populism per se so much as responses to degenerated media environments that have been captured by corporate and state elites. We need a new policy paradigm to supersede the market-oriented approach outlined by Van Cuilenberg and McQuail (2003), one that is based not simply around notions of freedom, access and accountability as they suggested, but on the redistribution that is necessary to confront the abuse of media power by states and corporations.

This is a paradigm designed to cater to the needs above all of disaffected citizens and depends on reversing the policy failures that I have outlined in this article. Instead of allowing further concentrations of media power, a redistributive media policy will seek to break up existing oligopolies and tackle the corrupting influence that comes with market domination; instead of bowing down to the giant digital intermediaries whose algorithms increasingly structure patterns of everyday life, a redistributive model will seek to find ways to use these algorithms better to serve the public interest, in part by forcing private companies to share their proprietary models; a redistributive model will siphon cash from the giant stockpiles held by the largest intermediaries to support new, non-profit grass-root journalism start-ups with a mandate to serve diverse audiences and finally, a redistributive model would seek to construct vibrant public media systems that are independent of vested interests and meaningfully able to hold power to account, to cater to all audiences, irrespective of partisan affiliation and social background, and to cut the ground from underneath the poison of the far right.