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The final speaker in this last ECREA 2022 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on the far right in Portugal and Spain. Until a few years ago, these countries had no major far-right parties, but the Catalan independence struggle led to the emergence of Vox as a successful far-right party in Spain in 2017, and Chega followed in Portugal a couple of years later.

Tiago examined the views of these parties as expressed on their Facebook pages from December 2021 (Vox) and September 2022 (Chega). Cheka’s main narratives have a strong anti-establishment tone, attacking the entire political system, conducting …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Judith Goetz, whose focus is on the Austrian Identitarian movement. This movement has been an effort to restore far-right language and and ideas into German-language discourse, not least by exploiting certain weaknesses and opportunities in centre-right discourses. This has pushed the boundaries of what can be said with impunity further and further to the right, and has established far-right views in the mainstream media and everyday life.

The Identitarians are a typical example of these developments, and Judith has analysed their discourses by drawing on the material published on their own …

It’s the final session at ECREA 2022 already, and what an excellent conference it’s been – so good to be back away from Zoom and amongst the people. This final session is on the extreme right, and begins with a paper by Bart Cammaerts on the appropriation and normalisation of fascist, extreme-right discourses by more mainstream right-wing politicians. In the process, struggles for social justice are being abnormalised in turn.

Such normalisation involves a demand side and a supply side: on the demand side, the increasing tensions arising from financial globalisation, cultural diversity, democratic deficits, and entrenched inequalities; on the …

The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2022 this week is Gary Younge, a former editor-at-large for The Guardian. He begins by playing a promotional video from his exploration of whiteness in America, from his perspective as a black man from the UK, which intended to flip the script on white journalists’ explorations of black lives in the US or UK. The clip went viral and Gary has kept getting recognised for it, even if the full documentary was perhaps not watched anywhere near as often.

The clip, unfortunately, reduced racism to a spectacle, and after a lifetime of teasing …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

Alternative news environments, then, are constituted by those actors who have shared the same alternative URLs either directly or by on-sharing other actors’ shares. The project worked with a sample of some 160 left-wing, right-wing, and ideologically different alternative news media across Germany, Austria, Sweden, and …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, focussing on the relations between professional alternative media as an indication of boundaries in the journalistic field. This connects with a long history of research into field theory and boundary work in journalism.

The present study thus understands journalism as a strategic action field – but even if boundaries are now blurry, they still exist: the actors in governance units (press, industry associations, union, funders) and incumbents (editorial-driven, legacy news media) intersect with each other and together form the field of journalism and produce a collective frame of …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is Azade Kakavand, whose study compares far-right networks across multiple platforms. Far-right here means a broad grouping that also includes the radical and extreme right, as well as both electoral and non-electoral groups. The networks between these actors may be affected by the different affordances that the various social media platforms offer.

The literature so far tells us that Facebook appears to be used especially for international connections between different political actors, and for sharing mainstream and alternative news; on Twitter there are denser networks within countries or language spaces, which are …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is by Svenja Boberg and colleagues, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the growing attacks against mainstream media (as ‘lying media’ or ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to this are also alternative news media sites that present their own views as a corrective to the mainstream. In Germany, these are deeply rooted in right-wing and populist communities, and are supportive of counter-hegemonic attitudes, including to COVID-19 containment measures. But the alternative media spectrum is complex: there is a continuum of outlets from mainstream-style outlets (via people who also …

It’s Saturday morning at ECREA 2022, and I’ve arrived a little too late to see the start of the session on online counterpublics, where Kilian Bühling is already in the middle of his presentation on German counterpublics on Telegram in the context of COVID-19.

The study explored what media content and media actors are being referenced in such counterpublics, and shows a considerable presence of political right-wing and radical (Querdenker) actors, but also that these developments ands their underlying ecosystem are not uniform. Distinct ecosystems are getting established here: both internal and external to Telegram. And there is a …

The final speaker in this final Friday session tab ECREA 2022 is Stefanie Walter, whose interest is in discovering inclusive keywords related to ethnicity and race. Minority groups are often framed negatively in the news, and this reinforces negative opinions and beliefs about them; but research into such framing is also difficult because it depends in the first place on the use of keywords and search strings for identifying relevant news articles.

The identification of such terms thus often depends on the researchers’ tacit knowledge, and may miss speciality terms like the UK’s ‘Windrush generation’ of Caribbean immigrants, while it …