Does a History of Autocracy Affect Which Side of Extremist Politics Mainstream Media Brand as Undemocratic?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sjifra de Leeuw, whose interest is in the recent rise of populist parties that also take an explicit stance against the role of mainstream media as supposedly elitist gatekeepers.

When news media frame such parties as anti-democratic, this has a distinct effect on their positioning, but not all extremist parties are marked in this way – and which are marked this way by the media may depend on the political history of the nation: nations with a leftist autocratic history may be more likely to brand leftist parties as anti-democratic, while nations with a right-wing autocratic history may brand right-wing parties as anti-democratic.

Usefully, Germany has a history of both, in the former East and West Germany, and this shows in the media branding of far-right parties such as NPD and leftist parties such as Die Linke. However, can such preliminary findings be replicated across other nations? Does it translate to the media coverage of foreign political parties?

The project is exploring this for the case of Spain, with its not entirely resolved history of a far-right military dictatorship; this work is still ongoing, however. If the results support the initial analysis, this would highlight the role of media as socialisation actors, and identify an democratic blind spot: news media may not be sufficiently critical of extremist parties that represent a side of politics that had been repressed in a given country’s earlier history.