10 Tips for Journalists Newly Covering the Far Right
1a. Don't reach for low hanging fruit. What Richard Spencer tweets is virtually never important. Spencer’s importance in general has been highly overrated.
1a. Don't reach for low hanging fruit. What Richard Spencer tweets is virtually never important. Spencer’s importance in general has been highly overrated.
1b. There is more to the white supremacist movement than the alt right. There is more to the extreme right than the white supremacist movement, too.
2a. Don’t stop with leaders/spokespersons. The more a right-wing extremist has talked to media, the more likely he or she is to have standard, calculated responses that are designed to give specific impressions. Don’t (ever) talk to Klan leader Thomas Robb. Talk to lesser
2b. known people, including rank/file. For some extremists, esp white supremacists, you may difficult to get pplto talk to you—which leads to temptation to talk to chatty media-hungry ppl like Spencer/Robb. Don’t surrender to it, even if it makes you knock on more doors.
3a. Do not ask simplistic straightforward questions that give them a chance to deny/obfuscate, such as “Why do you hate black people?” Approach their ideology obliquely at first so that they are less calculating and more candid.
3b. Except for those who seek shock value, most extremists seek to deny their extremism—and to deny as well whatever other (negative) impressions they think people have of them.
4a. Do not accept any answer about numbers/popularity, ever. When they tell you their group has a thousand members, don’t believe them. When they say they have grown greatly in membership since Event X, don’t believe them. Believe only what your eyes show you.
4b. Don’t blithely accept self-characterizations, either. When a militia group portrays itself as a neighborhood watch or an emergency response group, don’t accept it.
5. Do not let them distance themselves from the violence of their movement by brushing it off as a few bad apples or a lone nut or two. Challenge them on the violence (which means you have to know about it). Don’t let them brush away ugly aspects of their ideology, either.
6. Never lose sight of the fact that they are extremists, even if they are not foaming at the mouth. Most people don’t foam at the mouth. Don’t romanticize them, don’t normalize them, but also don’t make them into something bigger than they are—don’t magnify their importance.
7a. Do your homework. This is a specialty area. Whatever you thought about the white supremacist movement or the patriot/militia movement or whatever is likely to be substantially wrong. These are movements with long, convoluted histories and ideologies. There are many types of
7b. white supremacists. The sovereign citizen movement has many people of color in it. Know these things before you start interviewing the extremists.
8. Talk to experts before interviewing extremists, to make sure you are informed, & let experts help you parse/fact check what extremists have said to you. They can provide valuable context/info—& sometimes they can let you know that assumptions you have made are quite off-base.
9a. Make sure the experts you talk to are actually experts. Some people with no or limited knowledge like to position themselves as experts, especially after a major event. A number of self-appointed “experts” on the militia movement emerged after the OKC bombing. Few actually
9b. had expertise. A poly-sci professor who has written primarily on mainstream right-wing politics may not know much about the extreme right. An FBI agent who has not worked many extremist-related cases will have had no opportunity to develop knowledge about extremism.
10. Finally, with regard to expertise, right-wing extremism is something that many, many people think they know a lot about, even though their knowledge may in fact be superficial. Guard against people laymansplaining to you. It can happen.
