When the Far Right Makes the News: Protest Characteristics and Media Coverage of Far-Right Mobilization in Europe

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169029
• Author: Pietro Castelli Gattinara,Caterina Froio
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2024, Vol. 57(3) 419–452

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140231169029

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When the Far Right

Makes the News: Protest

Characteristics and

Media Coverage of

Far-Right Mobilization in

Europe

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

1,2

and Caterina Froio

3

Abstract

When do the media cover far-right protests? News coverage matters for the

entrenchment of the far right in contemporary democracies, but little

comparative research has looked at what drives news attention to far-right

mobilization. We apply a classic input–output process model of news se-

lection bias to test the hypothesis that the visibility of far-right protests events

depends on the characteristics of protest initiators, type of action, and re-

actions. We appraise this via logistic regressions on an original dataset of 5972

protest events retrieved from online press releases by far-right groups (input)

and national quality newspapers (output) in 11 European countries (2008–

2018). The analysis conf‌irms that news media are particularly responsive to

contentious action, protest around migration issues, and action–reaction

chains between political opponents. Our f‌indings shed light on the role of

news organizations in the success of the far-right and on the pathways by

which these movements shape public agendas.

1

Universit´

e Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium

2

Center for Research on Extremism, University of Oslo, Norway

3

Sciences Po, Paris, France

Corresponding Author:

Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Centre d’´

etudes de la vie politique (Cevipol), Universit´

e Libre de

Bruxelles, 44 avenue Jeanne, Bruxelles 1050, Belgium.

Email: pietro.castelli@ulb.be

Keywords

social movements, far right, protest, mass media, Europe

In recent years, protest mobilization has beco me a more integral part of far-

right politics across Europe (Mudde, 2016, p. 13), including street marches by

groups like PEGIDA in Germany, contentious actions by grassroots move-

ments such as the French G´

en´

eration Identitaire, and political violence by

extremist movement-parties like the Greek Golden Dawn.

1

Albeit these

bottom-up events still draw relatively few participants into the streets, their

coverage in the mass media experienced a sharp increase over the past decade.

But when do quality media report on far-right protest mobilization? If we

know that media attention is central to the social standing of progressive

protests and that coverage depends on the specif‌ic attributes of protest events

(e.g., Wouters, 2015), we still lack a comprehensive understanding of what

stimulates media attention to collective action on the far right.

2

In response,

this article builds upon extant research on social movements and the far-right

to study the drivers of media coverage of far-right protest mobilization in

European countries.

We believe that examining how far-right protesters access the media is

urgent, not least because it raises specif‌ic questions about the role of news

organizations in expanding these movements’appeal (Mondon & Winter,

2020). Despite the persistent concern with the link between the media and the

rise of far-right parties and leaders (de Jonge, 2019;Ellinas, 2018), there are

few comparative efforts to systematically gauge far-right grassroots mobi-

lization and its media coverage. In our view, this constitutes a major limit to

the understanding of contemporary far-right politics. On the one hand, it

reiterates the established view that protest action is chief‌ly a preserve of

progressive social movements, which recent studies are increasingly chal-

lenging (Minkenberg, 2019;Nissen, 2022). On the other, it neglects that

protest visibility is a crucial factor for how social movements bring about

change (Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993;Mattoni & Trer´

e, 2014). In contem-

porary “audience democracies”(Kriesi, 2004), where most people learn about

politics through the media, coverage sets the conditions for promoting

movement agendas, inf‌luencing public opinion, and shaping the general

understanding of a movement and its goals (Vliegenthart & Walgrave,

2012)—including on the far right. We thus believe that it is time to de-

velop cross-national, longitudinal accounts of the determinants of media

coverage of far-right protest mobilization across Europe.

With the present article, we seek to contribute to this scholarly debate.

Theoretically, we combine scholarship on social movements and the far right

to develop hypotheses on the determinants of media coverage of far-right

420 Comparative Political Studies 57(3)

protest mobilization. We build on a classic input-output process model of

selection bias in media coverage of protests (McCarthy et al., 1996), positing

that protest characteristics work as input signals for subsequent media cov-

erage (output), notably: (1) the organizational characteristics of the groups

promoting protests; (2) the characteristics of protest events; and (3) the

counter-protests by political opponents. Empirically, we present novel data

from the Far-Right Protest in Europe (FARPE) project, a unique dataset which

covers several thousand protest events by selected far-right collective actors in

11 European Union (EU) countries (2008–2018). We predict media coverage

statistically, by means of logistic regressions testing the conditions under

which the protest events promoted by far-right groups via press releases on

their websites (which we consider as input signals) are met with subsequent

coverage in newspaper articles from the quality press (output).

We f‌ind that classic input-output approaches to protest visibility in the news

can be applied to far-right collective action. The results show that quality

media react differently depending on the characteristics of far-right protest

events. Specif‌ically, we f‌ind that the coverage of far-right mobilization in the

mass media is driven by the reputation acquired by protest initiators on

specif‌ic issues, notably immigration. Furthermore, we conf‌irm that the media

attach a particular news value to large-scale events, contentious tactics of

mobilization and protests that generate controversy and drama via street

counter-protests by political opponents. By shedding light on the media

treatment of far-right protest mobilization, our results point at the interplay

between collective action strategies, media logics and the mainstreaming of

the far right in contemporary democracies. More broadly, our systematic,

cross-national account of the conditions under which news coverage of far-

right collective action occurs bridges the exiting gap between research on far-

right politics and the other subf‌ields of political sociology.

We begin by introducing the theoretical framework of the study, which is

rooted in extant research on (progressive) movements and far-right parties.

The following sections present the design and dataset used to test the hy-

potheses, and the results of the empirical analysis, before moving to the

conclusions and discussing the main implications of this study for future

research.

Getting into the News: Mass Media and

Social Movements

Explanations formulated by social movement scholars for media coverage of

protests have not been tested on far-right collective actors, despite evidence of

their consolidation in the electoral arena, and of a surge in their protest ac-

tivities across European countries (Castelli Gattinara, 2020). This “division of

labour”(Rydgren, 2007) between scholars of social movements and

Castelli Gattinara and Froio 421