How American journalism amplifies extremism (it’s not the way you think!)

With some luck, unbridled opportunism, and the right mix of underlying political conditions, an extremist politician can draw enough attention to get a few days of nonstop coverage from mainstream news media — and catapult themselves out of obscurity.

How does this happen?  My new book, Amplifying Extremism: Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism (free for a limited time here), written with Jessica C. Hagman, tries to understand this process.

Our takeaway is that mainstream fact-based journalism plays a central, if not the central, role in helping extremist politicians capture public attention.

Why? First, the underlying structure of the news industry today — the links between and across outlets and mediums, from syndication to wire services to public broadcasting — collapses distinctions between national and local news and facilitates the amplification of newly newsworthy politicians far beyond their immediate geographic locale.

Second, the news norms that help journalists decide what’s worth coverage and how to tell those stories rely on well-worn narrative scripts that distract from the serious threat extremists pose to democratic norms.

We focus our attention on a case study of a single politician in Illinois, Darren Bailey, who sued Governor J.B. Pritzker over his stay-at-home order during the early days of COVID-19, in April 2020.

Bailey was a back-bench first-term state representative from a town of 384 — and within five days, catapulted into the national news media, including an appearance on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle in front of nearly four million viewers.

He went on to accumulate enough power to run for governor and Congress and helped lead the Illinois Republican party to the far right of its centrist, pro-business, largely secular brand of Republican politics that had characterized the state’s politics since the 1970s.

Bailey’s script was novel then, but it’s familiar now. He cast doubt on the 2020 election results, refused to wear a mask in the Illinois State House despite rules requiring him to do so, promised to defy bans on assault weapons, and made jokes about jailing Pritzker.

In some ways, Bailey’s rise is the classic story of American politicians across history — but the ascent is concerning today, when extremist politicians¹ are magnets for public attention and have enough momentum and power to fuel democratic backsliding.

Extremist politicians are fueled in part by a broken, overly concentrated and networked news ecosystem, a consolidated right wing news media, and news norms that pushed Bailey’s name into the public locally, regionally, and nationally from the get-go.

While journalists and news organizations can’t do much about the swirl of toxic misinformation or the underlying structural conditions that facilitate right-wing extremism, our research shows some things journalists can do to avoid unintentionally amplifying extremists. We uncover weaknesses in the news industry that may boost illiberal politics.

Amplification by volume. We found massive repetition and duplication of stories and headlines. Sometimes, this was due to ownership. For example, Shaw Media, a privately held regional news media chain, has a statehouse bureau whose coverage is syndicated across seven dailies and 19 weeklies (one of the 19 weeklies has 16 editions) for a total of 41 local newspapers. These comprised 108 stories in our corpus — but this number only reflects six different original stories.

Nonprofit replacements can backfire spectacularly. Source diversity is not content diversity.

Capitol News Illinois, a nonprofit founded in 2019 to bolster diminished statehouse coverage, provides daily coverage to the Illinois Press Association’s 460 newspaper members and 100 broadcasters. That’s great for helping people across the state understand what’s happening in Springfield, but this effort to support local news also had the effect of geographically dispersing the reputation, presence, and importance of a renegade one-off politician far beyond his actual impact on the political scene.

Public media gives a huge boost. The network effect of public media, especially public TV, runs a similar risk of boosting bad arguments and bad actors beyond their proportional power in the public sphere.

WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station, gave Bailey some of his most extensive television coverage prior to his appearance on Fox News, with an extended cut 19-minute interview on its website. This extended engagement with Bailey on public television bucks the public perceptions of and current attacks on the liberal bias of public media. NPR stations in Springfield, Northwestern Illinois, and Champaign-Urbana jockeyed off each other’s coverage, running nearly identical web stories that were followed by a national NPR story.

Local TV matters. Local TV covers politics, especially when it comes as ready-to-go content, and local stations promoted Bailey’s mobile video where he announced his decision to sue Pritzker over the state of emergency. Nexstar’s Capitol Connection show also gave Bailey airtime and was available for syndication or reuse by other Nexstar stations, though it didn’t air in Chicago. 

AP stories can be pushed out to partisan readers. The Washington Examiner and Washington Times both ran AP stories for their audiences, under new headlines. The Daily Caller and Breitbart did write-throughs of AP reporting.

National journalism is sometimes the new local journalism. Sometimes the AP and other large outlets are on hand to scoop up what would otherwise be a first-pass story through smaller outlets. The AP told us its statehouse bureau covered the story for a good reason: a sitting legislator filed a legitimate lawsuit challenging the governor’s powers. Once a story is on the wires, it has a potential audience of four billion people. In an earlier era, a local newspaper might have done that first-pass coverage.

Right-wing outlets do local and regional shoe-leather reporting. Sometimes this goes beyond what presumptively nonpartisan news outlets do. Journalists for The Center Square Illinois, a nonprofit funded by the conservative Franklin News Foundation, reported on county officials across the state who followed Bailey’s lead and refused to enforce Pritzker’s orders. We didn’t see other news outlets offer that on-the-ground follow-up.

Opinion journalism doesn’t do what we think it does. Almost everything in our corpus was straight news journalism, though we saw a handful of opinion pieces as time went on. Pure play news coverage kept this story in the air. This wasn’t a partisan media war being waged through opinion, although it was a deeply partisan campaign to get press and attention.

Social media didn’t carry the day. It may be tempting to blame platforms for the spread of Bailey’s political influence. Our focus was on what news organizations decided to do with their coverage, not on public perception, but the widespread, targeted influence campaign that characterized later political flashpoints wasn’t necessary for Bailey to capture journalists’ attention.

The norms that guide news selection can be used to undermine democracy.

The language of constitutionalism and liberty is easily warped. We found that in daily coverage, it was hard for journalists to move beyond this rhetoric to critique implicit extremism and illiberal challenges to the rule of law.

Conflict language obscures and excuses extremists. Scholars and journalists know this, but conflict framing remains irresistible. Politico Illinois compared the conflict to “a big political football” for Pritzker.

Novelty delights, but also amplifies. Yes, Darren Bailey appears to have been the first Republican politician from a red state to challenge blue-state COVID restrictions. Yes, there was an unusual court decision granting Bailey a restraining order against Pritzker’s orders. This prompted follow-up coverage in national news media, which platformed Bailey further.

Zooming in to zoom out

The news industry — news organizations and individual journalists alike — may be somewhat powerless against pink slime journalism, foreign influence operations, viral conspiracy theories, and the social, political, and economic conditions that have made the U.S. vulnerable to right-wing nationalist populism.

But it’s up to journalists to take action to avoid accidentally amplifying champions of illiberalism. Extremist politicians ascend in part because of an overly concentrated and networked news ecosystem, and since 2020, we’ve seen the pattern play out over and over again.

“The news norms that facilitate democratic life,” we write in our book, “may also facilitate its undoing.”

1. We don’t choose the word “extremist” lightly. We used it to describe Bailey because his views were so far from those that had characterized Illinois Republican politics since the 1970s. Thanks to Bailey and other like him — and thanks in part to the legitimization of his antics and positions by the mainstream news media — that version of Republicanism is now the mainstream Republican party. We also recognize that much of what we first thought about COVID was wrong, and that many of these restrictions, like school closures, had negative downstream impact.