spore.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A community platform for justice and action.

Administered by:

Server stats:

239
active users

Elia Ayoub (he/him)

If you're confused by why The Guardian doesn't seem to know how to cover the far right, lemme tell ya something I learned not long ago.

Quick tread below

In 2020 two academics published a paper looking at how The Guardian has been mainstreaming the Far Right. At the core there is one problem (this is my simplification): the conflation of Far Right concerns with 'the people'. By default whatever the Far Right says has be taken more seriously than anything even left of center (let alone further left) which is also why the Guardian often uses 'populism' and 'the far right' interchangeably.

So these two academics, Aurelien Mondon and Katy Brown, looked at The Guardian's mainstreaming of the Far Right focusing on three aspects: 1) agenda-setting power and deflection, (2) euphemisation and trivialisation, and (3) amplification. Here's the paper journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/

They reached out to The Guardian and told them hey we have this paper, we thought you might find it interesting. The Guardian expressed willingness to read it. Mondon and Brown sent them the paper, and The Guardian proceeded to ignore them. They never responded back.

The Guardian has been mostly abysmal in covering the Far Right, ignoring basically every paper coming out on authoritarianism, the far right, fascism, and so on. It is much more convenient for them to continue describing the Far Right in such nonsensical terms:

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

The Far Right is treated as the default 'people', or as representing the default 'people'. It is not the views or experiences of racialised minorities that are platformed.

And there is no questioning of what would it exactly mean to take the Far Right 'seriously'. If the position is mass deportations of racialised peoples, how does one take that 'seriously'? We deport some but not all? We do antisemitism light instead of antisemitism?

There's never any analysis of what that actually means

This is very routine with The Guardian. Here is another example. "Crime is out of hand" is the headline they go for in an article covering the rise of the far right in an east German city.

But what's in the actual text? two unconnected statistics - rise in crime, and how many people are foreign born, with no connection between the two - followed by a Syrian woman who is terrified of the Far Right.

So why did the Guardian quote one AfD supporter in its headline?

theguardian.com/world/article/

You continue reading the text and you just cannot find any actual statistic related to 'rise of crime' besides this 9% number. But what explains that increase between 2021 and 2023? Could it be moving from Covid to 'post-Covid'? Anything else?

The Guardian absolves itself from actually answering that question, but wants you to know that this one AfD voter says there is "unchecked immigration" (there isn't) and that this is linked to a rise in crime.

The terrified Syrian woman and her mom are quoted in the piece, and their experience contradicts its very premise. But that's too inconvenient. It's a much easier story to select whose voice to platform and claim that prioritizing their concerns over others means being serious.

This is a choice, and one which The Guardian routinely makes. It contributes to a feeling that the march of the Far Right is inevitable.