Mimicking News: How the credibility of an established tabloid is used when disseminating racism

Abstract

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content.

A populist turn?: News editorials and the recent discursive shift on immigration in Sweden

“…The normalisation is also facilitated by "novel" combinations of various argumentative frames which, in turn, allow for "new" and radical interpretations of ideas and concepts to be put forward. This implies that Swedish news media are not immune to the wider populist currents visible in other national media contexts in Scandinavia (Farkas & Neumayer, 2020), and that they also follow the normalisation of uncivil and populist discourses which "gradually introduce and/or perpetuate in public discourse some new patterns of representing social actors, processes and issues" (Krzyżanowski, 2020b: 432).…”

“…They draw on a peculiar set of affordances created by so-called borderline discourse (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017), which gradually migrated from online and fringe spaces of uncivil society into mainstream politics and the media. This discourse -effectively placing uncivil opinions and ideas (such as anti-immigration expressed via racism and xenophobia) in frames of civil discourse (of democracy, nation-state, freedom of speech, rationalism, and the like) -has, to a large extent, allowed furthering nativism and right-wing nationalism in mainstream domains (see also Farkas & Neumayer, 2020).…”

“…In a similar vein, the Swedish news media have also seen a change in immigration-related language. Many of them have picked up -albeit in an often-subtle way -"uncivil" ideas and language brought from the uncivil political and media fringe into the mainstream (Ekström et al, 2020), in a way that corresponds to similar facets of media opportunism in both European and other Scandinavian contexts (e.g., Farkas & Neumayer, 2020).…”

Recontextualising the news: How antisemitic discourses are constructed in extreme far-right alternative media

“…Also, news published on what can be described as uncivil arenas may be conveyed through expressions that might, at first glance, seem civil. For instance, hateful discourses might be disguised by far-right actors by mimicking "real news" (Farkas & Neumayer, 2020). Studies have shown how far-right actors, rather than making up stories, often depend heavily on content from established news sources (Ekman, 2019;Haller & Holt, 2019;Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017).…”

Interpolations of class, “race”, and politics: Denmark's Jyllands-Posten and its coverage of Greek national elections during the “Greek crisis”

“…Research has critically addressed the development of such illiberal trajectories in Denmark, with special attention paid to the ways the media contribute to these phenomena (Farkas & Neumayer, 2020;Lentin & Titley, 2011;Yilmaz, 2016). The class dimension of liberal racism, however, remains understudied.…”