How journalism should deal with an insurgent far-right populist party such as Reform UK Ltd is clearly a matter of considerable contemporary concern, particularly in light of its recent successes at both the national and local level.
As the veteran media commentator Raymond Snoddy put it in The Media Leader: “If Reform is claiming, as it is, to be a party capable of governing this country, then the media must subject it to the same kind of scrutiny applied to Labour or the Conservatives. Such scrutiny must be applied to the past record of those associated with Reform, its current policies and its performance where it is in power, such as the ten local authorities where it is now in control.”
Press bias and the BBC’s editorial retreat
Thus far, the omens are far from encouraging. ‘Viewspapers’ such as the Telegraph, Mail, Sun and Express have already all but endorsed Reform (and not merely in their comment columns and editorials) and, courtesy of Ofcom, GB News is effectively its broadcast propaganda arm. Meanwhile, as Adam Bienkov has revealed in Byline Times, minutes of a recent meeting of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee show that the Corporation is drawing up plans to adjust its news story selection, at both national and local levels, in a vain effort to win the trust of Reform voters.
At a time when the local media have an unparalleled opportunity, indeed, a duty, to scrutinise how Reform is running the local authorities it has captured, such a move can only be described as an abject betrayal of the BBC democratic responsibilities.
The greatest danger in journalistic coverage of Reform is that it will, either unintentionally or deliberately, serve to normalise a party that is anything but normal. (In fact, it isn’t even a party but a company limited by guarantee.) Its pronounced xenophobia, its hostility to the very concept of human rights, its opposition to many of the tenets of liberal democracy (particularly the separation of powers, and not least its loathing of the judiciary) as well as its fraudulent posing as an ‘anti-establishment’ party and ‘the voice of the people’, all mark it out as a far-right populist party.
Understanding the far-right belief system
The nature of such parties, both in Britain and elsewhere, is the subject two recent books: Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar’s The Little Black Book of the Populist Right and the collection Pandering to Populism? (of which Snoddy is one of the editors, and to which I am a contributor). The latter, as its sub-title, Journalism in a Post-truth Age, implies, is particularly concerned with journalism’s role in covering the rise of far-right parties.
For the most part, the collection’s tone is critical and admonitory, but a glaring exception is the foreword by Sir Trevor Phillips, which reflects the dominant approach to Reform in much of the British media.
Phillips argues that right populism looks set to become the most severe test of the fourth estate’s claim to be a vital feature of modern democracies since the emergence of the anti-establishment radicalism of the 1960s. However, this is simply to take Reform’s populist ‘anti-establishment’ rhetoric at face value, which is particularly difficult given the key roles played in it by plutocrats such as Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Nick Candy and Zia Yusuf. Yes, ‘men of the people’ everyone.
In Phillips’s view, the default description of ‘far right’ for parties led by Farage, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen and others says more about the “arrogance of the media consensus than it does about the forces it describes”. Phillips asks what it is such parties are supposed to be ‘far’ from and surmises that it is “the comfortable dinner party consensus of senior journalists and executives that life would be so much better for everyone if the people just did what people like us recommended in our opinion columns and leaders”.
The ‘liberal elite’ and picking sides
So it’s all the fault of the much-mythologised ‘liberal elite’ safely ensconced in their Islington lairs, except there is emphatically no such consensus in a media environment dominated by right-wing papers, GB News and a thoroughly cowed BBC. Furthermore, snide expressions such as such as ‘comfortable dinner party consensus’ and ‘people like us’ are, in this context, themselves heavily loaded with populist baggage.
Phillips argues that “the advent of Right Populism has posed a sharp challenge to the very purpose of contemporary journalism”, and sees this as posing “difficult questions about the boundary between reporting and campaigning”. But this is to confuse interrogating the democratic bona fides of a far-right party such as Reform and taking a stand against it, which are two entirely different things.
Journalism: taking action on behalf of the public
However, Phillips maintains that “there are those in our profession who believe it should be the business of journalists to take a side when reporting this movement, usually in the name of some broadly-defined universal values – tolerance, equality, inclusion. I am not one of them”.
Very clearly not, and such values are also conspicuous by their absence in the right-wing press and GB News. Furthermore, those few journalists who do concentrate on exposing the reality behind Reform’s ‘anti-establishment’ rhetoric are in no sense ‘campaigning’ against it; they are simply doing the job that journalists are supposed to do, namely speaking truth to power and acting as the public’s watchdogs.
Thus, for example, when the Mail, after Reform’s local election victories, published the party’s ‘manifesto’ across two pages under the headline ‘NIGEL FARAGE: Our victory was seismic and the Reform era is just starting. Here’s everything my government would do – from ditching Net Zero to finally tackling immigration’, The Economist responded with a lengthy and detailed analysis which concluded that “Reform’s policies add up to an agenda of fiscal recklessness that rivals, and may well exceed, the disastrous 49-day, hair-raising, market-tanking premiership of Liz Truss in 2022.”
Perhaps Phillips would like to tell us which of the two is the ‘campaigning’ article? And which is the work of journalism worthy of the name?
A version of this article was first published in Media North: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North). For more from Media North, and to subscribe to their newsletter, visit their website.
