“A Heartless QAnon Embrace?”: What shapes conservative and right-wing media coverage of extremist-right movements

• In Event: 30807 - The Consequences of Collective Action

Abstract

What shapes conservative and right-wing news organizations’ coverage of contemporary extremist-right movements? How does this coverage compare to the mainstream media, and how might they influence each other’s coverage? Social movement scholars have held a long-running interest in how social movements gain media attention and the quality of this attention but have yet to develop theory on the media treatment of modern extremist-right movements or draw on the right-wing media as a source of empirical evidence. Recently, scholars of communication have pointed out the ability of right-wing actors to infiltrate their messages into the mainstream through the strategic use of social media and the help of a hyper-partisan, right-wing media ecosystem that has achieved profound influence in recent decades. I recenter this conversation on the relationship between movements and media, addressing the lack of empirical evidence and theorizing on these questions through a case study of two contemporaneous and highly controversial extremist-right movements—QAnon and the Proud Boys. To do so, I collected a dataset of 4,776 articles from two mainstream/liberal and four conservative/right-wing media sources, using a combination of computational topic modeling techniques and an abductive coding approach to identify highly newsworthy events and investigate differences in coverage across the sources. I argue that extremist-right movements, through their controversial actions and ideas, pose coverage problems that news organizations in the right-wing media ecosystem must address through coverage strategies that allow them to maintain their legitimacy while not alienating their audiences or compromising ideological allies in positions of power.

Author

• Maxwell James Roberts, University of California-Irvine