When the far-right makes the news: protest characteristics and media coverage of far-right mobilization in Europe

When do the media cover far-right protests? If the increasing visibility of the far right in the 21st century took place in a context of growing relevance of the media for politics, little is known about the mechanisms driving news coverage of rightist protests. Building on social movements research, we advance an innovative input-output process model in which media attention (output) is (also) the result of protest input characteristics for subsequent media coverage. We formulate hypotheses on the drivers of media attention based on protest input characteristics (ideology, issue of protest, and tactics). We use an original dataset of over 4,000 protest events retrieved from online press releases by far-right groups (input) and national quality newspapers (output) in eleven Western and Eastern European countries (2008-2018). We find that quality media react differently to different protest input characteristics, and are most likely to cover events by groups with radical (as opposed to extremist) ideologies, which address core issues like immigration and that trigger the reaction of political opponents. The results question the process by which visibility-seeking groups of the far right can internalize media preferences, and thus how media organizations may (in)advertently contribute to establishing right-wing populism in contemporary societies.