‘The Journalists Who Really Take Sides When Reporting on the Far-Right Are Its Cheerleaders in the Right-Wing Press’

In the recent collection, Pandering to Populism? Journalism in a Post-truth Age (to which I am a contributor), Richard Tait, a former editor-in-chief at ITN and one of the book’s editors, states that: “How to report populism fairly and accurately under unprecedented political and economic pressure will be journalism’s challenge for the next ten years and beyond. Some may indeed decide that pandering to populism is the best way to survive the turbulent years ahead, but if they do so, they are betraying journalism’s duty to speak truth to power.”

Warnings about normalising the far-right in general, and Reform in particular, have also been sounded by veteran media commentator Raymond Snoddy, another of the book’s editors, who in his columns in The Media Leader has described Reform as “anything but normal” and accused the BBC of helping to create the public persona of Nigel Farage long before he even became an MP. 

He also argues that “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.”

As a resident of Kent, whose County Council is now being scrutinised by a Doge-like team of “young tech entrepreneurs” (one of whom resigned as I wrote this article) and which, with a third of upcoming Council meetings already cancelled, appears to be grinding to a juddering (and doubtless costly) halt, it’s impossible to disagree.

However, the only problem is that significant sections of the media – that is The Telegraph, Mail, Express, Sun, Spectator and GB News – habitually apply remarkably little scrutiny to the Conservative party, and are particularly sympathetic to and uncritical of its most right-wing elements. Scrutiny, if you can call bitter and relentless hostility by that name, is reserved overwhelmingly for Labour.

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Disavowal and Denial

And it is in these media that we find not only the barest scrutiny of Reform but pronounced hostility to anyone having the temerity to describe the party as far-right. Of course, “far-right”, like “populist”, can all too easily be used as a catch-all term, but as Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar demonstrate in their Little Black Book of the Populist Right, it is perfectly possible to employ such terms while at the same time distinguishing between different types of far-right populist party currently operating in Europe.

However, this and the detailed work of people like Cas Mudde and organisations such as HOPE not hate is no barrier to the likes of Fraser Nelson in the Spectator, 10 June 2024, accusing critics of these kinds of parties of talking “nonsense” by positing the existence of “one ‘far right’ or radical-right lump”. And what’s his solution? To propose instead the equally lump-like but usefully euphemistic “new right”.   

In the specific case of Reform, 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 (although in actuality a company limited by guarantee), however much Richard Tice may rail against the label. 

The kind of ideological operations that are performed by these disavowals and denials of far-rightery are nicely illustrated by an article in The Telegraph on 6 May 2025. Headed “Calling Reform ‘Far-Right’ Won’t Work in Britain” it manages to combine denial of Reform’s far-right populist nature with disavowal of the presence of fascism in Britain’s past while at the same time throwing in a hefty dose of Europhobia. 

The article’s main complaint concerns a number of European media outlets calling Reform far-right in the wake of its local election victories, which it dismisses as symptomatic of their “narrow minds”.

In its view, their message is that “the fascists are taking over Britain!”. The only slight problem is that none of the media quoted in the article accused Reform specifically of being a fascist party.

Nothing daunted, however, it suggests, via selective quotation from Orwell, that as “fascism never took off in Britain in the 1930” it’s not going to do so now.

Admittedly it does mention Oswald Mosley (whilst consistently mis-spelling his name) but entirely ignores the admiration for fascism in Germany expressed by sections of the press, most notably the Daily Mail, and the activities of the largely pro-Nazi and virulently anti-Semitic Right Club, whose membership embraced the aristocracy and “high society”, members of the Lords, a number of MPs and William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw).

The kinds of anti-far-right coalitions formed in various European countries are dismissed as “grubby” and as expressions of the “tyranny of morality”, and the article concludes by reassuring readers that “there is nothing shameful about voting for Reform because they are not ‘far-Right’”.  Incidentally, in pieces such as this, putting the words “far right” in scare quotes is de rigueur. But “fascism”? Really?

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Sneers and Knee-Jerk Responses

One of the most bizarre aspects of articles denouncing the description of far-right parties as being exactly that is the pervasive impression given that the mainstream British media are overwhelmingly hostile to the kind of populism that such parties represent.

Thus in his contribution to Pandering to Populism, Telegraph regular Robin Aitken complains that “in most mainstream journalism the word ‘populism’ comes with an implied sneer”. Well, it most certainly doesn’t in the Telegraph, nor in the Sun, Express, Mail, Spectator and GB News – which is hardly surprising given that much of what appears in these outlets is itself drenched in populist sentiment. 

But, then again, Aitken believes, in the face of absolutely overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that “the traditional media has been, in the main, all too happy to cooperate with established political parties to quell disquiet and dampen down any debate on immigration”.

This has ceased to be “the political subject that dare not speak its name” only because new parties have developed for whom immigration is the key issue. However, according to Aitken, “the knee-jerk response of the media has all too often been to label such political movements as ‘populist’ as though the concerns these parties articulate are in some way illegitimate, they’re ‘populists’ so we can safely disparage and belittle them”. 

Aitken seems to have discovered the joys of critical discourse analysis, as he goes on to inform his readers that words have implicit as well as explicit meanings (never!), and that “‘populist’ and ‘populism’ are not, in any sense, neutral words. They are the very opposite. They are words freighted with subterranean meaning. They are words designed to alert the audience to a potential danger identified by the journalist … Instead of hearing the arguments, the audience is told not to trust certain parties or individuals.”

Aitken argues that the use of such language leads to “stunted debate and dishonest policy-making” and proposes that journalists should get on with what their job should be: “Observing and explaining – leave the judging to the audience.” Well, indeed, but the most peremptory scroll through the Telegraph as I wrote these words immediately threw up “illegal migration”, “tax sting”, “tax raid”, “wokeness”, “virtue signalling”, “preening elitists” and “lanyard class”, so perhaps Aitken should offer the paper his new-found insights into language.

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‘Anti-Establishment’ Rhetoric

However, the most pronounced examples of the attitudes to far-right populism discussed in this article are to be found in the Foreword by Sir Trevor Phillips to Pandering to Populism, which, it has to be said, by no means reflects the tone of the collection as a whole. 

Phillips argues that “what might best be described as 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 hippy radicalism of the 1960s. Back then the test was whether the media could afford fair and intelligent treatment to the anti-war movement. Today, we are again challenged by an anti-establishment force, this time dedicated to tearing up the global consensus on climate change, the value of multilateral institutions and the balance between national interests and global responsibilities. So far, we are failing the exam. To date, we have yet even to establish a common definition of the movement”. 

However, this is simply to take populist “anti-establishment” rhetoric at face value, which, in the case of Reform, is particularly difficult given the key roles played in it by plutocrats such as Farage, Tice, Nick Candy and, until 5 June, Zia Yusuf. And that’s without mentioning its extremely rich donors, many of whom had previously given generously to the Conservatives.

In 2024 they contributed significantly to the £4.75 million raised by the party, and DeSmog has also revealed that between 2019 and 2024 it received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, other highly polluting industries and climate science deniers. Yes, “men of the people” every one.

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The Imaginary Media Consensus

In Phillips’s view, the default description of “far right” for parties led by Trump, Meloni, Orban, Le Pen, and others, which “have all in their own ways, positioned themselves as the truth tellers in an uncertain future” (Trump? Truth?), says more about the “arrogance of the media consensus than it does about the forces it describes, many of whom now attract between a quarter and a third of the electorate”.

Phillips enquires what exactly it is that such parties are supposed to be far from and surmises that it is “some imagined central point on a left-right scale” or, more likely “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?” 

Yes folks, it’s all the fault of that dreadful “liberal elite” safely ensconced in Islington – except, as mentioned earlier, 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 (as I’m sure that Aitken would be only too happy to point out). 

And, again in context, “far right” has nothing whatsoever to do with distance from “some imagined central point” but simply indicates a particular position on the spectrum of right-wing ideas. 

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Campaigning and Reporting

Like Tait, Phillips argues that “the advent of Right Populism has posed a sharp challenge to the very purpose of contemporary journalism”, but sees the problem very differently, namely as posing “difficult questions about the boundary between reporting and campaigning”.

But this is to confuse interrogating the democratic bona fides of a party such as Reform, as Snoddy, rightly, advocates, and taking a stand against it, which are two entirely different things.

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”. 

Well, clearly not. This might be thought to be a remarkable admission from a former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, admittedly a highly divisive and controversial one, who, among other things, engaged in repeated attacks on multiculturalism both before, during and after his period there.

He was also suspended from the Labour Party for over a year in March 2020 for alleged Islamophobia. But the plain fact of the matter is that the only journalists who “take sides” when reporting far-right populism in the UK are actually its ardent fans in the right-wing outlets mentioned throughout this article and in which the values of tolerance, equality and inclusion are conspicuous by their absence. 

Furthermore, those few journalists who do concentrate on exposing the reality behind Reform’s “anti-establishment” rhetoric are in no sense “campaigning” against it but 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, in the wake of 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 Sir Trevor would like to tell us which of the two is the campaigning article? And which work of journalism is worthy of the name?