Getting ‘right’ into the news: grassroots far-right mobilization and media coverage in Italy and France

Original Article
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Abstract

How do non-established far-right actors reach visibility in the media? While much research focuses on media visibility of progressive movements and established parties, little is known about the coverage of grassroots far-right mobilization. Inspired by insights from media studies, social movement literature, and scholarship on the far right, the paper suggests that media coverage is a function of the protest strategies of non-established far-right actors. To this end, We use a new dataset measuring political claims made on the websites of CasaPound Italia (CPI) and the Bloc Identitaire (BI), and from newspaper reports in France and Italy. We use logistic regressions to quantify increasing media coverage based on specific characteristics of mobilization (issue ownership, dramatization, confrontation and counter-mobilization). Focusing on two countries with comparable political contexts but major differences in other factors relevant to far-right mobilization (number of migrants, asylum seekers, perceived most important problem, and proximity to elections), we illustrate that news coverage is more likely when CPI and BI mobilize on immigration, engage in street protest, and create public controversy. While broader comparative evidence is needed, the paper offers a novel meso-level perspective on the interplay between far-right mobilization and media attention, and it sets out an innovative method to combine online and offline data for the study of protest in far-right politics.

Keywords

Far right Mass media Issue ownership Press releases Italy France 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Swen Hutter and Jan Rovny for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We are grateful to friends and former colleagues at the Center for Social Movement Studies, Scuola Normale Superiore, and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, for stimulating discussions and feedback on our ideas.

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Copyright information

© Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Center for Research on Extremism, University of OsloOsloNorway
  2. 2.ESPOLUniversité Catholique de LilleLilleFrance

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