Varieties of Media Vandalism
The biggest threat to the nationalist populist project in its various flavours – authoritarian, libertarian, illiberal – are well informed citizens. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that quality media outlets are one of the main targets of national populists of various stripes. The Financial Times’s Edward Luce recently called Jeff Bezos’ ‘management’ of the Washington Post ‘calculated vandalism.’ Vandalism is a useful way of describing how nationalist populists try to shape national mediascapes in their favour. However, there seem to be at least three variations on the theme of populist media vandalism.
In the US case, Luce described Jeff Bezos’ approach to the Post in the following way:
‘[R]eviving the Post is evidently not Bezos’s objective. His goal seems to be to convert what Donald Trump used to call the “Amazon Washington Post” into a harmless shell of its former self as a display of knee-bending.’
Other examples of ‘pro-Trump oligarchs’ (Luce’s words) who have taken control of US media outlets to vandalise them include Elon Musk – who took over the social media platform Twitter and essentially turned it into a cesspit of misinformation and online hatred – and the Ellison family who among other things acquired the CBS network and used their control to undermine its ‘courage journalism’ and instead adopt a resolutely pro-Trump line according to Luce.
These examples illustrate that in the US media vandalism from far-right figures takes a plutocratic form. Super-rich individuals or families buy up quality media outlets and essentially run them into the ground, by successive waves of restructuring, firing journalists, and undermining any critical reporting. This plutocratic variety of media vandalism may be a reflection of the country’s hugely inequal wealth distribution and the existence of obscenely rich billionaires. Other contexts seem to give rise to other forms of media vandalism.
In some countries where nationalist populist have a solid grip on power, they use the levers of state power – rather than merely private wealth – to bring the media under control and vandalise them. Probably the most striking case is Victor Orban’s Hungary, which we studied for our Norface-funded POPBACK project. Orban – Hungarian Prime Minister since 2010 – has used various levers of power to reshape the mediascape. The state has revoked radio licences and Orban allies have been buying up newspapers, radio- and TV stations to then donate them to the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA in Hungarian). As a result, an estimated 80% of the media in Hungary are aligned with Orban, which dramatically enhances his chances of winning yet another Parliamentary election in April.
Hungary may be the most extreme but by far not the only case of right-wing populists using their control over the state to reshape the mediascape (See our comparative study of Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Turkey in Media, Culture, and Society here).
These are two rather radical varieties of media vandalism which presuppose considerable economic- or political power concentration respectively. More subtle forms of media vandalism can be observed where democracy is still functioning to some extent and where nationalist populist power is more diffuse.
In such cases, the first target of nationalist populist media vandalism tends to be public broadcaster. During the Tories right-wing populist phase, the BBC has come under sustained political pressure both from outside and from the inside. From the outside, a constant barrage of accusations of ‘left-wing bias’ has sought to undermine the corporation’s credibility and reputation for quality journalism and entertainment (the reality seems to be quite a different one). From the inside, the role of Sir Robbie Gibb – former communications director of conservative PM Theresa May – as member of the BBC Board – appointed by Boris Johnson – has been particularly controversial. Star-journalist Emily Maitlis denounced Gibb - who also helped co-found far-right TV station GB News – as an ‘agent of the Tory party’ on the BBC board who influenced the reporting of journalists. She cited him as a reason for her leaving the BBC in 2019. Several other high-profile journalists left the BBC, while politically aligned ones – such as arguably Laura Kuenssberg – got promoted to prominent positions.
Another tool of media vandalism targeted at public broadcasters are attacks on licence fees. In Switzerland, the far-right Swiss People’s Party – a party with sympathies for Donald Trump – has launched an initiative to cap the Swiss Broadcast Corporation’s licence fee at CHF200 – a cut by nearly half from the current level. A popular referendum will take place on March 8, 2026. If successful, the initiative – which would not allow the SBC to compensate the reduction in fee income with additional advert income – would lead to redundancies and undermine the provision of quality news accessible to everyone.
Such attempts to vandalise quality journalism are often motivated by a mixture of economic and political objects. Economically, the destruction of public broadcasters would create more space for Fox-News-style private challengers – such as GB News in the UK. Politically, vandalising critical investigative reporting benefits right-wing politicians who seek to use the power of the state to enrich themselves by reducing scrutiny and exposure. Longer term, destroying critical journalism creates the conditions for populist parties to conquer and cling on to power: Namely, gullible and badly informed citizens prone to conspiracy theories and fake news strategies on which nationalist populists rely. To achieve these goals, nationalist populists seem to adopt various media vandalism strategies depending on context. The important question for the future of quality journalism is how to counter such strategies. Our POPBACK project has yielded some practitioner-orientated insights.
