Recontextualising the news: How antisemitic discourses are constructed in extreme far-right alternative media

Abstract

This study explores how an extreme far-right alternative media site uses content from professional media to convey uncivil news with an antisemitic message. Analytically, it rests on a critical discourse analysis of 231 news items, originating from established national and international news sources, published on Frihetskamp from 2011–2018. In the study, we explore how news items are recontextualised to portray both overt and covert antisemitic discourses, and we identify four antisemitic representations that are reinforced through the selection and adjustment of news: Jews as powerful, as intolerant and anti-liberal, as exploiters of victimhood, and as inferior. These conspiratorial and exclusionary ideas, also known from historical Nazi propaganda, are thus reproduced by linking them to contemporary societal and political contexts and the current news agenda. We argue that this kind of recontextualised, uncivil news can be difficult to detect in a digital public sphere.

Refugees versus ‘refugees’: the role of Islamophobia in Swedish alternative media’s reporting on Ukrainian asylum seekers

“…Relatedly, this paper contributes new knowledge to the field of media studies by showcasing how alternative media promote ideologically driven far-right world views, rather than functioning as a form of corrective source of information. While this is not in itself a new discovery (e.g., Figenschou and Ihlebæk, 2019; Haanshuus and Ihlebæk, 2021; Mayerhöffer and Heft, 2022; Nygaard, 2019; Schroeder, 2020), the reliance on Islamophobia specifically, no matter the relevance to the topic of reporting, is however a new finding. In highlighting this, the current paper exposes the extents to which far alternative media are willing to exploit a topic to promote an ideological position beyond what has been previously identified.…”

Reporting the news: How Breitbart derives legitimacy from recontextualised news

“…This first required us to operationally define ‘news’. Within their study, Haanshuus and Ihlebæk (2021: 41) used the following definition: ‘professional news sites with an ascribed editor and that adheres to an established ethical code of conduct’. However, while this definition proved useful for much of the corpus, some examples did not meet these criteria yet still could have been considered a form of recontextualised news.…”

“…In addition, other source material, such as information from polling bodies or think-tanks would also be excluded within this definition. This again highlights one of the prevalent issues when studying Breitbart as opposed to overtly racist alternative media such as in the case of Haanshuus and Ihlebaek (2021), where the use of seemingly mainstream source material is not recontextualised through heavy editing and framing, but through subtler means in order to bolster the legitimacy of Breitbart's journalism.…”

“…These practices constitute 'recontextualised news', understood as the movement of certain elements of language and discourse across different social locations (Krzyżanowski, 2016(Krzyżanowski, , 2018. Such practices are not unique to Breitbart: Far-right partisan media frequently recontextualise content from mainstream media institutions to advance their own message (Haanshuus and Ihlebaek, 2021;Haller and Holt, 2019;Krzyżanowski and Ledin, 2017). As Krzyżanowski (2016) has argued, through examining both the production and recontextualisation of texts, we may better understand how discourses are strategically reordered and ideologically repositioned.…”

Freedom of expression or censorship of antisemitic hate speech?

“…Now, however, it is primarily neo-Nazis who promote antisemitic ideas -most notably conspiracies about Jewish power and Holocaust denial (e.g. Haanshuus & Ihlebaek, 2021). Following the discredit of antisemitism in the public sphere after the Holocaust, other far-right actors have largely distanced themselves from Nazism and antisemitism to reach a wider audience (Jackson & Feldman, 2014).…”