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Special Issue: Media and the Extreme Right
... This "man in the street" is not only gendered but also racialized as white and associated with heterosexuality. Indeed, Ouellette and Banet-Weiser (2018) have argued that "one of the primary characteristics of the extreme right is nostalgia for a particular kind of identity: the white, heterosexual man" (p. 5). ...
Research has increasingly drawn attention to the role of online conservative news media in propagating disinformation and reinforcing social inequalities. Scholarship, however, has yet to explore how these media represent intersectionality. Using a grounded theory approach, I examined how 427 online conservative news reports, from nine widely searched websites in the U.S., portrayed intersectionality. The authors of the reports employed a complex set of discourses to condemn intersectionality, constructing it as limited, hierarchical, and divisive, while also conveying panic over its ability to bring individuals on the Left into coalitions. I thus develop the concept intersectional panic to account for how these media responded to intersectionality with a considerable amount of fear or anxiety. Findings reveal that intersectional panic overlaps with, yet also operates differently from, other forms of panic, such as racist, sexist, or anti-LGBTQ fears, because the former involves anxiety over multiply-marginalized individuals advancing in U.S. society. I further reveal that these conservative news media sometimes used intersectional discourses to condemn intersectionality. Building on Patricia Hill Collins’s (2019) understanding of intersectionality as a critical tool for social justice, I argue that emphasizing intersectionality’s expansive and beneficial capacities would help challenge such panic.
... In this regard, I follow Jason Stanley's (2018) analysis which highlights attributes such as anti-enlightenment, the celebration of inequality and nativism, a deepseated nostalgia and well-developed victimhood, as well as anti-democratic authoritarianism and the rejection of the separation of powers. In addition to this, a broken and toxic hybrid media system is actively contributing to this crisis of liberal democracy, amongst others by amplifying the appeal of populist neo-fascist tropes and agendas (Forchtner, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak 2013;López 2014;Ouellette and Banet-Weiser 2018). ...
... Amidst the escalating anger and calls of "No justice, no peace," social injustice and racial divisions have taken center stage. What the expansive scope and momentum of movements such as #BlackLivesMatter have taught us is that digital technologies -and particularly social media -are changing the face of politics and activism (Ouellette & Banet-Weiser, 2018). Individuals, organizations, and activist groups are increasingly taking to social media and other digital platforms to raise awareness of systemic racism and to call for the deinstitutionalization of this deeply ingrained problem (Gantt Shafer, 2017;Matamoros-Fernández, 2017). ...
... Amidst the escalating anger and calls of "No justice, no peace," social injustice and racial divisions have taken center stage. What the expansive scope and momentum of movements such as #BlackLivesMatter have taught us is that digital technologies-and particularly social media-are changing the face of politics and activism (Ouellette & Banet-Weiser, 2018). Individuals, organizations, and activist groups are increasingly taking to social media and other digital platforms to raise awareness of systemic racism and to call for the deinstitutionalization of this deeply ingrained problem (Gantt Shafer, 2017;Matamoros-Fernández, 2017). ...
Digital technologies, and the affordances they provide, can shape institutional processes in significant ways. In the last decade, social media and other digital platforms have redefined civic engagement by enabling new ways of connecting, collaborating, and mobilizing. In this article, we examine how technological affordances can both enable and hinder institutional processes through visibilization-which we define as the enactment of technological features to foreground and give voice to particular perspectives and discourses while silencing others. We study such dynamics by examining #SchauHin, an activist campaign initiated in Germany to shine a spotlight on experiences of daily racism. Our findings show how actors and counter-actors differentially leveraged the technological features of two digital platforms to shape the campaign. Our study has implications for understanding the role of digital technologies in institutional processes as well as the interplay between affordances and visibility in efforts to deinstitutionalize discriminatory practices and institutions.
... More recently, the spreading of right-wing populism across Europe and other parts of the world (for instance as part of the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the anti-refugee discourses by far-right parties in Europe) has also been accompanied by particular forms of misogyny (Walton 2012;Keskinen 2013;Wilz 2016;Ouellette & Banet-Weiser 2018) and a backlash against women's as well as LGBTQI+ people's rights. ...
... In the culture section of NRM's online universe, we see ample evidence of the collapse of any meaningful boundary between political communication and popular entertainment -a convergence of cultural categories which is often described as being at the heart of the current extreme-right moment but also of transformations of the media landscape more generally (Ouellette & Banet-Weiser, 2018). In this sense, neo-Nazi groups today, and extremist actors more generally, dovetail on a broader cultural trend of an increasing symbiosis of popular media, political punditry, and persuasion. ...
This article is based on a case study of the media narratives of the neo-Nazi organisation Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) and situates this particular actor within the broader landscape of violent extremism in Sweden today. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis informed by narrative inquiry, I examine various cultural expressions of neo-Nazi ideology in NRM's extensive repertoire of online media. Theoretically, I turn to cultural perspectives on violent extremism to bring to centre stage the role of popular culture and entertainment in the construction of a meaningful narrative of community and belonging built around neo-Nazism in Sweden today. The analysis explores the convergence between different genres, styles, and content into new cultural expressions of national socialism which bleed into mainstream Internet culture and political discourse in new ways. In the online universe of NRM, the extreme blends with the mainstream, the mundane and ordinary with the spectacular and provocative, and the serious with the silly. In this manner, the analysis lays bare the strategies through which NRM seeks to soften, trivialise, and normalise neo-Nazi discourse using the power and appeal of culture and entertainment.
... Content analyses of populist and anti-immigration discourse by citizens on Facebook demonstrate that citizens communicate their views to people they perceive as part of their in-group (Ouellette & Banet-Weiser, 2018). In other words, people tend to share their populist sentiments with like-minded others, connecting with imagined communities of ordinary people they feel close to. ...
Social Network Sites (SNSs) provide a platform for different actors to directly communicate populist ideas. Politicians and citizens can bypass elite media by directly speaking to the people via social media. Although a growing body of research has investigated the effects of populist messages, extant research has not explicitly compared how the dissemination of populism by (1) traditional media, (2) politicians, and (3) ordinary citizens can activate populist attitudes on the demand-side of the electorate. Relying on a comparative experiment in three countries (the US, UK, and the Netherlands, N = 1,096), this paper shows that the effects of populist messages on populist attitudes are contingent upon four factors: (1) the likelihood of selecting populist content in real life, (2) relative deprivation, (3) political cynicism, and (4) identification with the “ordinary people” as a source of populist ideas. There are no direct effects of populist communication by the news media, citizens, or politicians. Source cues on their own thus do not make populist communication more or less persuasive. Together, this study shows that people are most likely to be persuaded by populist messages when these messages confirm dissent, source identification, and media exposure patterns.
... Although this gap in knowledge is being rapidly redressed (e.g. Ouellette and Banet-Weiser, 2018;Schradie, 2019), this is an ongoing project and further work needs to be undertaken to develop theoretically informed empirical work, which conceptualizes the dynamics of communication ecologies that allow hate speech to circulate and become normalized. ...
This article sets out findings from a project focused on #stopIslam, a hashtag that gained prominence following the Brussels terror attack of 2016. We initially outline a big data analysis which shows how counter-narratives – criticizing #stopIslam – momentarily subverted negative news reporting of Muslims. The rest of the article details qualitative findings that complicate this initial positive picture. We set out key tactics engaged in by right-wing actors, self-identified Muslim users, would-be allies and celebrities and elucidate how these tactics were instrumental in the direction, dynamics and legacies of the hashtag. We argue that the tactical interventions of tightly bound networks of right-wing actors, as well as the structural constraints of the platform, not only undermined the longevity and coherence of the counter-narratives but subtly modulated the affordances of Twitter in ways that enabled these users to extend their voice outwards, reinforcing long-standing representational inequalities in the process.
... In line with these premises, recent research has identified a surge in the direct online communication of populist actorswho use Twitter and Facebook to speak directly to their electorate (e.g., Waisbord & Amado, 2017). At the same time, the digitization of the mediascape has resulted in the spread of extreme-right, fact-free sentiments by (discontented) citizens (e.g., Ouellette & Banet-Weiser, 2018). Not least because of the absence of journalistic gatekeeping, social network sites that engage different actors in the spread of disinformation are crucial to consider in understanding the impact of intended falsehoods on society. ...
Today’s fragmented and digital media environment may create a fertile breeding ground for the uncontrolled spread of disinformation. Although previous research has investigated the effects of misinformation and corrective efforts, we know too little about the role of visuals in disinformation and fact checking. Against this backdrop, we conducted an online experiment with a diverse sample of U.S. citizens (N = 1,404) to investigate the credibility of textual versus multimodal (text-plus-visual) disinformation, and the effects of textual and multimodal fact checkers in refuting disinformation on school shootings and refugees. Our findings indicate that, irrespective of the source, multimodal disinformation is considered slightly more credible than textual disinformation. Fact checkers can help to overcome the potential harmful consequences of disinformation. We also found that fact checkers can overcome partisan and attitudinal filters – which points to the relevance of fact checking as a journalistic discipline.
... In online settings, ordinary people can communicate fact-free issue positions, and communicate the conflict between their in-group and others. As the online and fragmented media setting gives rise to a polarized climate where truth is less central than belonging to an imagined community that shares worldviews, the online expression of populism has important democratic implications (Ouellette & Banet-Weiser, 2018). It may for example give rise to the construction of an imagined community of nativist and xenophobic citizens, who are connected by their partisan views and empowered to express their identity in online mediascapes that are independent of space and time. ...
Populism has become prevalent all across the globe. To date, however, we know too little about the ways in which populist discourse is constructed by citizens on social media. To advance the field, this study draws on a qualitative content analysis of Facebook posts by ordinary citizens in the Netherlands. The results indicate that Facebook offers a discursive opportunity structure for Dutch citizens to vent their populist discontent and to interact with like-minded others. Online populist discourse on Facebook is hostile and uncivil, predominately targeted at the elites and marginalized groups in society. By providing insights into how ordinary citizens construct the boundary between “us” and “them,” this article enhances our understanding of the construction of citizens’ populist discourse on social network sites (SNSs), and how these expressions contradict the principles of democratic communication.
... Since the election of President Trump in the United States and the Brexit vote in the U.K., along with the rise of radical-right movements in a significant number of European states (Gidron & Hall, 2017) and in parts of the Global South, populism has increasingly been subject to scholarly debate (see e.g. Dodd, Lamont, & Savage, 2017;Freeden, 2017;Ouellette & Banet-Weiser, 2018). However, the meaning of populism remains contested and ambiguous, related to a range of ideological positions, discourses and practices. ...
While leisure, race, and national populism have been minimally linked and theorized in the literature, we take this moment, during the global turn to national populism and conservative regimes, to center leisure and race in the politics of today. While theorizing the link to leisure and national populism, we center how the turn towards ethno-nationalist populism derives from the workings of race, alongside class, caste, and ethnicity, in various global north and global south leisure contexts. We provide an introduction that puts in conversation the realms of leisure (in all its possibilities), race, and the various modes of national populism. Therefore, we provide both the important theoretical foundations to understanding these relationships while offering numerous instances of such shifts to national populism. In particular, we start the conversation with a case of the realm of art, sport, and protest as a way to pull out the extraordinary links to social phenomenon, power, and theory.
Existing across multiple media platforms, Barstool Sports (“Barstool”) is one of the most important sport brands in the United States. While Barstool’s critics frequently assert that the company is “racist,” few, if any, detail how their racial politics work. Through a brief genealogy of Barstool’s cultural history and a close critical reading of “The Barstool Documentary Series,” we show how Barstool’s racial politics operate through gender—specifically the affective appeal of Big Man sovereignty and the homosocial bonds of White fratriarchy —to create and normalize racially exclusive and White male-dominant social worlds that dovetail remarkably with racial and gender ideas that organize what Maskovsky calls Trump’s “White nationalist postracialism” and the Proud Boys’ “Western chauvinism.”
This article investigates the dissemination of reactionary antifeminist disinformation and the networked practices of misogynistic users under the guise of “gender equalism” mediated by Namuwiki, South Korea’s most popular wiki. In 2016, a Namuwiki user published an article arguing that “gender equalism” had replaced feminism in Western societies and academia because feminism is in fact female chauvinism, in that it necessarily involves reverse discrimination against men in the pursuit of women’s rights. While most of the references and evidence were miscited or fabricated entirely, the fallacious article was nevertheless expanded and shared widely online as if factual for almost six months. I first explore how the fabricated concept of gender equalism drew on Western antifeminist discourses while appealing to Korean misogynists through condemnation of Korean feminists in particular. Next, I examine how Namuwiki’s norms and policies, such as “notability” and “vandalism,” reproduce and facilitate misogynistic knowledge production. I describe the broad circulation and support of gender equalism as “wikiality within the manosphere,” that is, the creation of a self-reinforcing reality founded on antifeminist sentiments and consensus. By discussing the implications of the case as the epitome of antifeminist disinformation in the post-truth era, I expand the current understanding of “fake news” to include a broader paradigm of fictitious factuality that encompasses the wikiverse within the manosphere and foregrounds misogyny as a critical and inextricable component.
Influencers are a defining feature of the contemporary social media landscape, but little has interrogated how these individuals may privilege information sharing as essential to their brand. This article interrogates the role of the knowledge influencer, or those who perform micro-celebrity to convey information and expertise to lay audiences. Knowledge influencers can be doctors, lawyers, or anyone, regardless of class, who is an expert in their occupation. In doing so, knowledge influencers perform what I call calibrated expertise, or the curated performance strategy in which experts harness social media affordances, platform dynamics, and aspects of micro-celebrity to impart information. Through a case study analysis of social media veterinarians on Instagram, I show how calibrated expertise is discursively performed, and knowledge influencers emerge, at a cultural moment in which neoliberalism continues to blur the lines between work and play, and populist backlashes against experts are ubiquitous. By navigating micro-celebrity, authenticity, and relatability, knowledge influencers put a human face and contemporary cultural spin on expertise. Though, this does not mean the knowledge influencer is the answer to sweeping distrust, but rather, is an untapped resource for considering information sharing and power dynamics in neoliberal, populist times.
„În ultimii 30 de ani, în România, prezența la vot a fost comparabilă cu cea a majorității statelor occidentale. Înseamnă asta că România are un nivel ridicat de participare politică și civică?
Pe baza datelor culese în ultimii 10 ani (2011-2021), acest volum răspunde următoarelor întrebări:
Românii sunt activi civic sau nu? Care este tipul dominant de cultură politică în România? Cum se compară românii, din perspectiva valorilor civice și a participării, cu alți cetățeni occidentali? Cum putem măsura eficient participarea civică, politică sau electorală?
Cum este influențată participarea de rețelele sociale, de Facebook sau Google? Creșterea predispoziției de protest este un fenomen de durată?
Cum au evoluat aceste tipuri de participare în ultimul deceniu, în România? Cum arată cetățeanul participativ? Va crește participarea în viitor, după efectul noii pandemii covid-19?
Este o carte care sper să fie de folos cercetătorilor, activiștilor civici, profesioniștilor în comunicare, dar și cititorilor pur și simplu interesați de detaliile subtilităților de participare din România, derivate din cercetări ample și foarte actuale”.
Nationalism is presumed to promote individual and collective freedoms. Under contemporary populism, however, its inclusive vision is reformatted toward an ‘us-versus-them’ form. Against the backdrop of media populism, this article shows how exclusionary nationalism hinges on the communicative might of Facebook which forms part of the bigger project of mediatization of politics in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. Through a reading of Duterte pages and interviews with journalists, it examines the prominent themes and narratives that stitch the ‘pro-Duterte’ and ‘anti-critics’ divide. The former is characterized by pro-masses icon, mainstreaming of infrastructure programmes, and police-military forces, and the latter by anti-indigenous hate, homogenization of opposition, and red-tagging. The implications of these narratives on media populism are presented.
This chapter focuses on the practices and challenges faced by higher education (HE) in order to engage ‘Generation Like’ (Frontline 2014) , the generations who have grown up with social media, in learning to be critical, cosmopolitan and global political subjects. We present here a specific case study based on experience at the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón (UJI) , Spain, in the undergraduate degree course in advertising and public relations at the Department of Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, in the subject of ‘Communication towards Equality’ (one term, fourth year) . This pedagogical project contributes to international discourses on global education (GE) by sharing evidence from an interdisciplinary approach that combines global citizenship education (GCE) with areas of media literacy and communication for social change, to explore and design an innovative syllabus on ‘transgressive communication of social change’.
Using conjunctural analysis and informed by insights drawn from critical whiteness studies, sport studies, and masculinity studies, I offer some developing interpretations on two inter-related questions. First, how sport has been used to cultivate and popularize the proto-fascist white nationalist project(s) currently gripping the United States. And second, how sport facilitates the production and popularization of the unapologetic and omnipotent performance of white masculinity that seems central to the popular appeal of this contemporary American white nationalist assemblage. To address these questions, I critically examine the patterned ways Donald Trump, first as candidate and then as President, has used sport to promote his white nationalist project. Additionally, I critically unpack the writings and performances of two white male cultural figures who are key figures within Trump nationalist assemblage. The first, Richard Spencer, coined the label ‘alternative right’. The second, National Football League superstar, Tom Brady, is a man who Trump loves to call a ‘good friend’. I contend that, like Trump, they venerate (in Spencer’s case) and normalize (in Brady’s case) an idealized performance of white masculinity I call white male omnipotence, that is central to explaining the appeal of Trump’s nationalist project to “Make America Great Again” for many anxious white Americans.
Este artículo presenta una revisión de la fundamentación teórica, la implementación y la evaluación de propuestas de aprendizaje crítico basado en valores de paz, igualdad y justicia social global. Para ello, este trabajo aborda el caso de la Comunicación transgresora de Cambio Social en la educación superior por medio de metodologías participativas y cooperativas para la adquisición de competencias comunicativas y digitales orientadas a los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible. Además, se plantean los principales retos educativos en el espacio universitario, teniendo en cuenta el papel que desempeñan las redes sociales digitales en los procesos de aprendizaje y en la construcción de identidades. En concreto, analizamos dos asignaturas de la Universitat Jaume I de Castellón (España): "Comunicación para la igualdad", del Grado en Publicidad y Relaciones Públicas, y "Comunicación para la paz", en el Máster Universitario en Estudios de Paz, Conflictos y Desarrollo. Los planteamientos que aquí se recogen están fundamentados en una concepción de la enseñanza superior como una comunidad de aprendizaje para una ciudadanía crítica y activa capaz de localizar las raíces de la violencia cultural para imaginar y promover otras realidades, mediante la creación de nuevos relatos. Basándonos en la tradición de una pedagogía crítica y de una comunicación de cambio social, nos centramos en detectar discursos transformadores exitosos para aprender a construir otras opciones políticas a través de la comunicación
This article analyzes two notorious photos of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage—one on their own, and one alongside Arron Banks, Gerry Gunster, Andy Wigmore, and Raheem Kassam—standing in a gold-plated elevator after Trump had won the US election. The article provides a cultural and political analysis of the plutocrats who are playing at being ordinary “winners,” or what it calls normcore plutocrats. Analyzing the symbolic and material contexts of these two images, it considers the physical context of the lift within Trump Tower; the tangled web of relationships uniting the men in the lift; and the first photograph’s later life as a social media meme. Asking how a depiction of glittering luxury can be presented as populist revolt, it discusses how elites draw on discourses of meritocracy, of “traveling up the social ladder,” to validate their actions. That Trump and friends are not on a ladder but in an express lift symbolizes the attempted velocity of this phase of corporate meritocracy. In the process the analysis provides a multilayered contribution toward understanding how these normcore plutocrats in gold elevators have achieved and extended their power.
This article will argue that the `reflexive project of the self' (Giddens) has become an explicit form of labour under post-Fordist capital in the form of `self-branding'. Here, work on the self is purposeful and outer-directed; self-production is heavily narrated, marked by the visual codes of the mainstream culture industry, and subject to the extraction of value. The article will explore inflections of self-branding across several different mediated forms. Contemporary marketing literature identifies the construction of a branded persona as a central strategy in the negotiation of increasingly complex corporate environments. Recently the practice and logic of personal branding has moved out of the boardroom and into the television studio. Television shows such as The Apprentice and American Idol invent a narrative of self-branding and simultaneously produce branded personae. Websites such as 2night.com extract value from partying young people; photographers take pictures at nightclubs and link them to advertisements online, blurring the distinction between product and consumer, private self and instrumental associative object. The logic and practice of self-branding is inflected differently again on social network sites such as facebook.com or myspace.com, which are inventories of various types of `selves'. These forms of self-branding, found across several different kinds of media, illustrate the erosion of any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and capitalist processes of production and consumption.
I argue that we have reached the political limit of what our cultural investment in media recognition and representation might deliver with respect to social and cultural justice. This limit is expressed by the alignment of several interlocking histories including new technological capacities for representation, the intensification and proliferation of difference, the spread of market logic to all aspects of social life, and the reinvention of government. Culturally, in this conjuncture, struggles for media representation, visibility, and recognition no longer index collective histories and political struggles but the triumph of the market where difference affirms the celebration of diversity as lifestyle politics, market choice, and the promise of individual freedom to maximize market options.
- Bratich