‘How the Media is Cashing in on the Rise of Nigel Farage’

Let’s talk about how the media is fuelling the rise of Reform. This is not a new topic. We have seen and heard mainstream journalists, editors and broadcasters asking each other: Are we responsible for the rise of Reform? But after a cursory moment of introspection, they generally reaffirm their journalistic decision-making, and deflect culpability onto other pied pipers.

When The News Agents were asked this question by a listener, they decided it was a “lefty cop-out” to blame the media. Yet I have seen nothing but media cop-outs, and most offensively, a media continuing unchanged. The truth is our media did not just fuel the rise of Reform, they cashed in on it.

Of course, there is no straightforward channel of blame (and I say ‘blame’ to condemn not the rise of a new party, but the fact that the party rising was one founded on hatred).

On the one hand, yes, UK outlets are guilty of giving Reform disproportionate coverage with a disproportionately singular focus on frontman Nigel Farage. And yes, politics pages have long been locked in a two-party matrix that fails to cater to those pouring out of its rusty crevices.

On the other hand, no, this is no longer the newspaper era when Rupert Murdoch made the man in charge – there’s a myriad of social and alternative media (some fronted by Farage) with whom the mainstream must compete.

And no, the mainstreaming of far-right ideas is not an exclusively British phenomenon. Also, no, there are not many inspiring alternative parties willing to break from the broken status quo.

But to set the parameters of this debate around Reform is to entirely miss the point. The key way in which our media has failed us is by making the most clickable politics the most successful.

With one hand, our media has shunned Reform as unserious (thereby playing into their anti-establishment narrative), while fanning with the other the flames of culture warfare and Us versus Them identity-making (on the right and the left alike), that give Reform such an easy route forward without requiring them to offer root-cause solutions.

“In many ways, our media repeatedly falls into the trap that extremists lay out for us,” radicalisation researcher Dr Rajan Basra told Media Storm.

This was in 2022, when we were investigating a far-right attack on an asylum centre in Dover, which occurred amid headlines of an “invasion” on our border— headlines that quoted then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman in her carefully clickable wording. This trap, Basra calls “destroying the grayzone”. 

“I don’t know if it’s just how the media’s structured,” Basra lamented.

The sad truth is, it largely is.

Ad-funded media quite literally live off clicks, and even editors at other outlets pour over ‘most-read’ leaderboards and pressure reporters to compete accordingly.

It’s therefore easy for politicians, especially former media personalities like Farage and Donald Trump, to say things they know the media will repeat – even if they are inaccurate or immaterial, or in no way ameliorate people’s day-to-day issues – because they’re clickable. In this way, our media prostitutes its services out to politicians in exchange for clicks. The cost is moderate politics.

Clickbait naturally favours extremist messaging. In the clickbait cooker, certain ingredients take heat and rise, while others flatten and get discarded. Seeds of division offer more bite than universal values; fear is far more flavourful than facts; ridicule makes a better roast than reason.

These ingredients may make juicier headlines, but they are also the ingredients of nascent fascism. We have seen them poison democracies before, and we have said “never again”.

I am not telling our media to boycott legitimate parties or bury their heads in the sand. Just stop doing all the other stuff we call out in this column each week. Stop publishing data that falls far below the threshold of academic publication, stop letting charismatic politicians write their own headlines, stop butchering nuanced reporting with exaggerated headlines that blatantly misrepresent the articles themselves, and stop dehumanising minorities by denying them voice in coverage that is directly and primarily about them.

Of course, it is complicated calling something ‘extremist’ once it has officially entered the mainstream. Britons are now slightly more likely to consider Reform UK (37%) as the main opposition party, ahead of the Conservatives (33%).

But there is a set definition of ‘far-right’ ideology, and it does not change or become less alarming the more people vote for it.

That said, people voting for Reform are not the problem— they are us.

“We all have to take a bit of responsibility,” said LBC broadcaster Natasha Devon when she joined Media Storm’s live debate on this topic, “by not bothering to engage as much with nuanced, thoughtful, long-form journalism, we fuel the clickbait market”.

We are all responsible for the ways in which our society allocates political currency, for the ways we condemn each other before seeking to understand, for the ways we emote when we should rationalise and rationalise when we should emote. 

But unlike the clickbait media, we do not all cash in on it. The ability of the far-right to thrive in a post-Nazi world is a damning indictment of a media so commercialised, it is willing to reward whichever would-be leader incites the public to click on it.