Farage, Musk and Trump: they crave your attention. Don’t give it to them | Andy Beckett

5 hours ago 1

Even more than other forms of politics, populism needs an audience. Populist politicians want to be famous personalities, to make attention-getting claims and promises, to create new national myths. Like other ambitious but less ideological entertainers, they want their act to be widely noticed, and then requested again and again. Without a receptive audience, populism can just seem cranky and simplistic – little different from fringe political movements down the ages.

In Britain, the US and many other democracies from India to Argentina, populism’s current dominant variant is rightwing, and much of its intended audience is the rightwing media. Conservative commentators, reporters and public intellectuals are constantly required to amplify populism’s messages and help maintain the public profiles of its leading figures. With only five Reform UK MPs, Nigel Farage needs the Tory press – just as the Tory press needs him, with rightwing politics in Britain otherwise at a low ebb.

Yet populism also benefits from journalists who think of themselves as neutral or even hostile towards it. For at least a decade, since the beginning of the Brexit referendum campaign and Donald Trump’s first successful run for president, many centrist and left-leaning political observers have been fascinated by populism’s transatlantic resurgence. From the BBC to the Financial Times, the New Statesman to this paper, the media have exhaustively interviewed populist voters, reported breathlessly on populism’s electoral breakthroughs, minutely analysed Trump, Farage and Elon Musk’s social media posts, and speculated about their next moves.

With Reform UK close to catching up with Labour and the Tories in the polls, and Trump about to take office again, it’s hard to argue that this coverage has been unjustified. But for opponents of rightwing populism, it has also been politically disastrous. Populism’s preoccupations now shape politics in Britain and far beyond, suppressing interest in crucial issues such as the climate crisis and pushing the mainstream parties to the right.

Even the most extreme populists are increasingly presented by the media as legitimate or unavoidable parts of the political landscape – a process of normalisation rarely applied, if ever, to the radical left. Last week, the veteran BBC phone-in host Nicky Campbell, not usually someone to hype political figures, introduced a discussion about whether Musk should have a role in our politics by calling him “one of the most important men on the planet”. Such self-fulfilling descriptions must delight the man himself.

Could there be better, less counterproductive ways for liberal journalists to cover populism? It ought to be a great subject for critical scrutiny. Often full of contradictions, addicted to overpromising and with a terrible or nonexistent record of actually governing, populism provides so many areas for investigation. Reform UK’s last election manifesto, for instance, pledged both to “cut taxes” and “repair our broken public services”, to introduce “zero tolerance policing” of “all crime and antisocial behaviour” and end “government waste”. Such hugely ambitious policies should be subjected to the same sceptical questioning as Labour’s more modest programme.

Populist voters could also be treated less reverently. Their dissatisfaction with, and understanding of, the state of the country is not unique but shared by many supporters of all parties. The Brexit heartlands are not the only places in Britain with deep social and economic problems. Nor are populist voters necessarily the committed rebels against the status quo that the media portrays. Many have periodically been lured back by the traditional parties, as the increases in Labour and Conservative support at the 2017 and 2019 elections, respectively – which were largely at the expense of Ukip and the Brexit party – made clear.

Liberal journalists could think more carefully, too, about when to give populists publicity. Just because the manic pace and melodramatic rhetoric of populism perfectly fit digital news’s relentless demand for content, it doesn’t mean that journalists should report every populist provocation, boast or threat. Often, these political moments are at least as stage-managed and empty of substance as announcements by the traditional parties, which the media sometimes rightly ignores or treats with contempt.

Finally, journalists could look at today’s populism with more historical perspective. Charismatic but demagogic leaders, voters yearning for dangerously simple solutions, scaremongering about foreigners and liberal elites, the scapegoating of immigrants: all these have featured in western politics before, with horrible consequences. Yet centrist journalists still sometimes treat populism as a novelty or a mystery, seemingly baffled that an unequal, turbulent world – one that centrism had a large part in creating – has produced reactionary revolts once more. There is little that Trump or Farage has done so far that would surprise anyone who saw the radicalisation of the European right during the 1930s.

If this century’s populist surge is going to be contained or reversed, many consumers as well as producers of liberal media are going to have to change their behaviour. The urge to pay immediate attention to whatever new, outrageous thing populism’s main protagonists are doing – in effect, to respond to their trolling – has to be reduced. These stunts are a kind of political junk food: known to be bad for you, but addictive, especially perhaps for pessimistic liberals and leftists, always looking for signs that the right is on the rise and that the world is in terrible trouble. For years now, Trump and Farage have lived in the heads of millions who never vote for them. Only the duo’s retirement from politics will end this situation completely, but until that happy day, liberal media consumers could at least learn not to be so masochistic.

It’s often said that journalism is suffering a crisis of credibility. That crisis will only worsen if supposedly rigorous media institutions continue to cover populism so credulously – and especially if regimes such as Trump’s second turn out to be disastrous failures. Even people who voted for them may then rage at the media for not asking the populists the right questions.

Yet blaming journalists alone for populism’s dominance of the media avoids an uncomfortable issue of wider complicity. Until voters begin to find populism boring, until its obsessions make them yawn and look away, it will be in the ascendancy.