How (not) to cover the fringe right
I live and work in Berkeley, California. We’ve become a top destination for fringe-right groups hoping to raise their profile by provoking controversy (and street fighting). Here is some advice for journalists covering similar events:
- Figure out if they’re serious
Some of the fringe-right actors come out of an online trolling subculture that celebrates a well-executed hoax. Exhibit 1: This non-shutdown of the Golden Gate Bridge:
This same action was initially reported by several broadcasters and one newspaper as a legitimate political action. They could have avoided that embarrassment, if they’d checked the Facebook page for the event, which had zero confirmed attendees.
2. Figure out if they’re organized (and don’t assume they are):
A lot of fringe-right events are organized for the sake of provoking conflicts with counter-protesters, not for the sake of actually pulling off a successful event. Before you produce advance coverage that just assists the provocation, ask if there’s any there there.
Start by looking for the paperwork. The convener of August 27th’s cancelled “No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley, for instance, submitted her application for a permit weeks late, and incomplete. She was (predictably) denied a permit, and cancelled her protest.
Similarly, the organizers of the upcoming “Free Speech Week” at UC Berkeley missed multiple deadline extensions to file routine paperwork for their events, and lost their venues:
(Also: they apparently didn’t bother to invite a number of people they’d advertised as speakers.)
3. Don’t take their politics at face value
According to analysis of right-wing chat logs by Reveal, organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, were explicitly calling on attendees to mask their white supremacist affiliations in a bid to make their politics more palatable to mainstream conservatives:
It was part of a strategy to generate sympathy by provoking assaults by anti-fascist counter-protesters.
The lesson? The person telling you they’re in the streets to “defend free speech” may not be be accurately representing their political goals. See if their posts on social platforms match the persona they just presented to you, before you run their quote or soundbyte.
(When I interviewed a right-wing protester in Berkeley, he earnestly laid out economic arguments that limiting immigration would improve the lot of native-born workers — and denied his position had anything to do with the race or nationality of the immigrants. When I looked him up online, I found a *lot* of videos of him promoting outlandish anti-semitic conspiracy theories.)
4. Don’t produce free advertising for them
The troll theory of organization building is pretty simple: provoke the biggest possible controversy, get tons of negative coverage, and that coverage will still reach people sympathetic to your cause. Ninety-nine percent of the people who a story reaches may wind up hating you — but the one percent who don’t are still enough to grow your followers.
If you are covering people who do not already have enough of an organization to get a protest permit or book a speakers’ hall, then you’re probably doing them a huge favor by giving them any coverage at all. If they’re people who got your attention by misrepresenting their plans or their politics, then your coverage may be giving them an incentive to keep deceiving.
So, what to do? Start with three questions:
- What is the story here? Is it a story about the prospect of violent clashes between antifa and free-speech defenders, or about how a group of crypto-fascists are trying to use one city to troll national media? Is there any story at all?
- How can I minimize hate-group promotion? Don’t link back from your coverage to social media accounts or organizational websites for hate groups or people engaged in ethically-challenged attention-seeking behavior. (If you have to illustrate a point with social media content, use a screenshot instead of an embed or a link — your audience can’t click through a screenshot to become a follower, and the screenshot will preserve content that the object of your coverage may later remove. )
- Is this proportionate to my coverage of anti-hate groups? At most of these events, counter-protesters outnumber the fringe righters by large margins. Are you linking to the organizations staging the counter-protests? Are you naming their leaders in ways that will increase their following? Are you embedding their social media posts in your own writing? (If you find that you’re only doing those things for dishonest attention-seekers, you’ve been trolled.)
5. Contextualize, don’t sensationalize, violence
Skirmishes between extreme-right protesters and counter-protesters have been a regular feature of these demonstrations. In fact, as Reveal’s reporting demonstrated, they’ve been a desired outcome for some extreme-right groups. So, how can you avoid sensationalizing the violence, without glossing over or dismissing it? Here are some questions to run through:
- Did demonstrators work with or against authorities’ plans to keep them safe? One organizer of right-wing demos in the Pacific Northwest has a history of changing venues at the last minute, which de-rails the crowd-control plans meant to prevent camera-ready melees with counter protesters. If something like that happens, and the only thing that makes your coverage is the ensuing fight, your audience is missing important context.
- Was violence central, or incidental, to a demonstration/counter-protest? There is a big difference between a fight breaking out on the edge of a peaceful rally, and the leader of that rally encouraging people to start fights.
- Is your coverage of violence proportionate to the actual amount of violence? If a demonstration was peaceful for hours with a few minutes of incidental skirmishing resulting in no serious injuries, then headlining and leading your coverage with the fighting is probably sensationalistic.
- For any given incident, do you actually know what happened? A lot of the worst coverage of protests here in Berkeley has come from national outlets who didn’t bother to send their own reporters. Instead, some poor person riding a desk tried to piece together what happened from social media videos (looking at you, Washington Post). Remember: 1) videos don’t show you what happened before the camera started recording; 2) videos don’t show you what’s happening out of frame, 3) captions can be lies; 4) viral social videos skew towards the most sensational moments of an event, not the most representative ones. My advice: If you don’t have the resources to actually *report* a story, then don’t run it.
