Populism, the media, and the mainstreaming of the far right: The Guardian’s coverage of populism as a case study

AuthorAurelien Mondon,Katy Brown
Published date01 August 2021
DOI10.1177/0263395720955036
Date01 August 2021
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720955036
Politics
2021, Vol. 41(3) 279 –295
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395720955036
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Populism, the media, and the
mainstreaming of the far right:
The Guardian’s coverage of
populism as a case study
Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon
University of Bath, UK
Abstract
Populism seems to define our current political age. The term is splashed across the headlines,
brandished in political speeches and commentaries, and applied extensively in numerous academic
publications and conferences. This pervasive usage, or populist hype, has serious implications for
our understanding of the meaning of populism itself and for our interpretation of the phenomena
to which it is applied. In particular, we argue that its common conflation with far-right politics, as
well as its breadth of application to other phenomena, has contributed to the mainstreaming of
the far right in three main ways: (1) agenda-setting power and deflection, (2) euphemisation and
trivialisation, and (3) amplification. Through a mixed-methods approach to discourse analysis, this
article uses The Guardian newspaper as a case study to explore the development of the populist
hype and the detrimental effects of the logics that it has pushed in public discourse.
Keywords
discourse, far right, mainstreaming, populism, racism
Received: 31st March 2020; Revised version received: 21st July 2020; Accepted: 23rd July 2020
Populism seems to define our current political age. The term is splashed across the head-
lines, brandished in political speeches and commentaries, and applied extensively in
numerous academic publications and conferences. In fact, it has become so ubiquitous
that The Cambridge Dictionary made it ‘word of the year’ in 2017, since it represented ‘a
phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders
across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and
economic discontent’.1 This trend can also be witnessed in academia, where the volume
of studies on populism has skyrocketed. For example, searching the Web of Science data-
base reveals that the number of publications containing populis* in the title, abstract, or
Corresponding author:
Aurelien Mondon, PoLIS Department, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: a.mondon@bath.ac.uk
955036POL0010.1177/0263395720955036PoliticsBrown and Mondon
research-article2020
Article
280 Politics 41(3)
keywords has risen sharply, from 310 between 1970 and 1979, to 1498 between 2000 and
2009, before more than quadrupling to 6482 from 2010 to 2019 (see Graph 1).
Some scholars were quick to point to the potential problems presented by the concept.
Back in 2004, Annie Collovald (2004) warned of the dangers of the term as a less stigma-
tising mode of referring to the extreme right. Cas Mudde (2007) stressed early on that
such parties should be called ‘populist radical right’ as opposed to ‘radical right populist’,
as the latter would put the emphasis on populism (a secondary characteristic) away from
radical right (which Mudde argued was the core of the ideology). Unfortunately, this
nuance appears to have often been lost, feeding what some have termed a ‘populist hype’
(Glynos and Mondon, 2019) and avoiding the careful work undertaken on typology and
terminology over the years. Therefore, it is common to see the term applied to a multitude
of disparate movements from the left to the right, and increasingly in contexts outside of
politics. However, in general, it tends to be used in a derogatory manner to describe a
threat to the status quo, usually understood in liberal democratic terms. While not central
to this article, it is nonetheless important to note that, building on poststructuralist dis-
course theory, we see populism as a discursive strategy through which ‘the people’ is
constructed against an elite (see Katsambekis, 2016; Laclau, 2005; Stavrakakis and
Katsambekis, 2014; see also Stavrakakis et al., 2017, on whether far-right parties should
be considered populist at all).
Through a combination of Discourse Theory (DT), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS),
and Corpus Linguistics (CL), the aim of this article is to explore the way in which the
concept of populism has been hyped in elite discourse and the consequences this has had.
Building on the growing body of literature that provides a critical account of populism
and ‘populist studies’, with particular attention paid to anti-populist trends and the popu-
list hype (see among others De Cleen et al., 2018; Dean and Maiguashca, 2020; Moffitt,
2018), this article uses The Guardian newspaper as a case study to explore the ways in
which the populist hype has not only been constructed and developed, but also the logics
it has pushed and imposed in public discourse. More precisely, the discussion of the arti-
cle centres on three impacts we see as core to populist hype: (1) an ignorance of agenda-
setting by elite actors and processes of deflection; (2) a process of euphemisation and
trivialisation, where the signifier ‘populism’ tends to replace not only more accurate
descriptors but also more stigmatising ones such as ‘racism’ or ‘far right’; and (3) a pro-
cess of amplification, where otherwise minor groups, movements, and political actors are
given disproportionate coverage. This, we argue, participates in an overall process of
legitimisation and mainstreaming of the far right where ‘populist’ politics are awarded
democratic value as the alternative to the status quo.
Case study and methodology
In November 2018, The Guardian launched ‘The new populism’, ‘a six-month investiga-
tive series to explore who the new populists are, what factors brought them to power, and
what they are doing once in office’. This, readers were told, was to respond to a new
moment in politics where ‘populist leaders now govern countries with a combined
population of almost two billion people, while populist parties are gaining ground in more
than a dozen other democracies, many of them in Europe’ (The Guardian, 2018c). For the
purposes of selecting our case study, this 6-month series signalled a very conscious edito-
rial focus and provided a clear timeline to structure our analysis. Furthermore, The
Guardian’s liberal, centre-left approach to politics makes it an interesting case, as it

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