Beyond Mainstreaming: Multidimensional Accreditation of Far-Right Voices in Political News

Today, the political mainstreaming of far-right parties is reflected both in their growing institutional presence and in the increasing penetration of far-right ideas in public discourse. Much research has examined the role of news media as central mediators of this process of discursive normalization. Two main approaches dominate this literature, each corresponding to an empirical demonstration through content analysis. First, assessing the extent of far-right actors’ inclusion in media coverage by analyzing mentions; second, evaluating the agenda-setting power of far-right parties by quantifying the media presence of both issues they “own” and interpretive frames they promote (Katsourides and Pachita 2023; Völker and Gonzatti 2024). These are simple but relevant metrics, which allow us to evaluate the hampering of the “cordon sanitaire” around far-right actors and ideology. Yet, they offer only a partial understanding of the accreditation of far-right voices in media representations of politics. We still miss a comprehensive examination of not just the presence, but also the status and framing of far-right actors and discourse in media narratives – a dimension thus far explored only at a limited scale (Ekstrom et al. 2021). This paper leverages state-of-the-art methods for automated media content analysis to tackle this question from an original angle. We automatically extract all quotes attributed to political officials, including far-right, from a large corpus of French newspapers spanning three decades and four newsrooms, totalling more than 2M extracted quotes (Bonutti D’Agostini et al., under review). Our method detects triplets of source, reporting verb, and quoted statement. This allows us to assess the current state of media accreditation of far-right actors across five interrelated dimensions: agency, voice volume, voice framing, discursive issue segregation, and political class recognition. First, comparing quotes to mentions, we gauge to what extent far-right actors populate news narratives as political subjects rather than objects. Second, we examine how the volume of far-right quotes has evolved in relation to its electoral trajectory. Third, we compare the reporting verbs chosen to introduce far-right vs. other quotes, to understand if far-right actors are normalized or, conversely, singled out as deviant at the level of voice framing. Fourth, we comprehensively examine on what issue areas far-right actors are quoted, to evaluate their level of discursive segregation – a reduction of which would signal accreditation. Finally, we build an indicator of far-right source diversity (amount of actors quoted) to measure media recognition of the far-right political class. We find evidence of media accreditation of the far right in the form of voice volume and discursive issue de-segregation. Yet, results related to agency, voice framing and political class recognition are less straightforward. Comparing quote-to-mention trends for far-right parties with those of other rapidly ascending groups shows that far-right actors remain objects more than subjects of political news. Observations regarding the diversity of quoted far-right actors are tempered by strong message control and off-the-record quoting. Furthermore, far-right voices are persistently singled out through quote framing, being disproportionately introduced with verbs suggesting journalistic distance or political levity, especially in some issue areas.