Unite the Right served as a ‘wake-up call’ for how journalists covered white supremacy, but has the media followed through?

Reevaluating coverage of hate groups and extremism in the U.S.

Final Project for Journalism Ethics (COMM-409) Spring 2022

By Nina Heller

When it comes to covering white supremacism and extremism in the U.S., the Unite the Right rally in 2017 Charlottesville, VA exposed faultlines in the ways journalists cover white supremacy in the U.S. 

At a time when public distrust in democratic institutions is high, many journalists have spent the past five years reevaluating how to best cover threats of white supremacy and domestic extremism. Although each newsroom’s specific approach varies, common trends include the creation of specialized beats, increased training and caution around the narratives used to frame white supremacists as individuals and as a whole for the groups they belong to and the ideology they hold. Experts and journalists alike agree that when covering these issues, it is important not to cover them as isolated events. 

Frank Smyth, the founder and CEO of Global Journalist Securities, the largest U.S.-based hostile environments training and consulting provider, said the Unite the Right rally was alarming because it was the most “blatant” display of white power in the U.S. since World War II. Smyth said since then, Americans have been less reluctant to think about white supremacy and white nationalism. He said, this resulted in Americans seeing acts of hate that followed that as less surprising, especially during the administration of former President Donald Trump. 

“Since then, we slowly have seen the press normalize the presence of white nationalists and white supremacists or the because the President was making so many repeated comments that were that were serving to legitimize white power groups that had the effect to normalize their presence, their language and their ideas,” he said. 

Unite the Right was a wake-up call not just for Americans to start paying attention to these issues, but for the press to take them seriously in their coverage as well. The threat that groups such as the KKK pose is even greater if journalists don’t pay attention, experts say. 

Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor at American University who studies persuasive strategies used by violent extremist groups to recruit and radicalize audiences targeted by their propaganda, said that the Unite the Right rally was an “inflection point” that served as a sign to change how journalists approach covering domestic extremism. Previously, he said, people were more focused on jihadist extremism and didn’t take the threat of white supremacy in the same way. Unite the Right, he said, made journalists realize they needed to shift their focus. 

“For a long time, researchers knew that the far-right groups were going to be the next big threat to U.S. domestic security, but U.S. policy was very heavily focused on jihadist types of extremism,” Braddock said “I think Charlottesville changed that a bit in that it showed in living color, live on TV that white supremacy and far-right extremism was a threat the U.S. faces.”

Braddock said that what made Unite the Right so alarming was that white supremacists no longer felt like they had to hide. 

“Prior to 2017 [white supremacists and extremists] were very largely confined to kind of the dark spaces of the internet. They didn't communicate quite so openly as they do now, and this is largely because they seem to have many allies in general politics, who are more than happy to to mimic their talking points to appeal their constituencies,” Braddock said. “So the ways they have communicated, really, it's just become more open and it's become less hidden and the language that used to be coded or the language that used to be very carefully chosen is less carefully chosen now. They're more than happy to speak more openly about their white supremacist goals than they have been in the past.”

Erin Logan, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, said that considering the history of how newspapers have covered racism is important in understanding the development of the media industry.

“Initially, especially in white newspapers, it wasn't even, ‘’We have to get both sides of the story,’” Logan said. “It was ‘There's only one side of the story and it's this racist viewpoint,’”

For some newsrooms, that shift in focus has come with establishing more specialized beats across their newsrooms. In February, the Washington Post announced the launch of a “Democracy Desk,” which will provide “incisive and revelatory stories about the erosion of trust in the democratic process,” according to the Post’s announcement. Although most of the stories and beats will focus on voting rights and access to voting, Matea Gold, the Post’s national editor said, the reporters on that team will work with reporters across the newsroom to look at wider issues of democracy and their implications for public trust in democratic institutions. Covering the institutions of democracy and threats to them, she said, is a necessary and pressing issue. 

“The broader questions about democracy that this team is going to tackle in conjunction with our colleagues across the newsroom is just a question of, what happens in our society when people begin to lose faith in the democratic process, and how that is manifesting itself in often extreme viewpoints and rhetoric and even really pretty unnerving threats against public officials,” Gold said. 

Smyth agreed that having reporters dedicated to focusing solely on these issues is a positive thing, and said that properly reporting on white supremacy includes not just reporting on what white supremacists say, but what they are actually doing and what they believe. This, he says, helps to challenge contradictions and falsehoods that extremists may try to perpetuate. 

“[White supremacists] frame their arguments now, in a broader sort of broad front kind of coalition against government overreach, in favor of gun rights in particular,” he said. “But what they're really talking about is white nationalism, it seems to me at least. Not all of them, but a great many of them, and that white nationalism is dangerous and we need to report it for the danger that it is whether or not that ends up giving them some level of a platform.”

Not a standalone issue

Gold said that Unite the Right opened the eyes of many journalists and newsrooms alike. White supremacy, she said, does not exist in a vacuum.  

“I will say that that incident, I think was a wake-up call in a lot of newsrooms that we have to give a lot of thought to this as an ongoing story, not something that was just sort of a singular event, but clearly a strand in American culture now that we're just going to have to really be aware of and monitor,” she said. 

With this in mind, Gold, the national editor at the Washington Post, said it is important for journalists to make sure that when they are writing about these issues, they debunk false claims very strongly and don’t contribute to disinformation. 

“Writing about these issues, if you do it in a really thoughtful careful way that also debunks false claims very strongly that that doesn't contribute to disinformation, It actually kind of helps people give them the tools to assess what's being claimed,” Gold said. “We have to do that thoughtfully and carefully without amplifying their threats or creating more risk for people but it is very important, I think, to put a spotlight on those who are purveyors of hate and make sure that they're held accountable for their actions.”

According to a May 2021 poll from PBS, NPR and Marist, 79% of Black Americans agree that white supremacy is the most lethal terrorism threat in the U.S., while 65% of white Americans disagree.

Braddock, who studies how extremists communicate and persuade others, said journalists can continue improving their coverage of white supremacy by interviewing experts on the subject for their articles, rather than pundits. 

“It has to do with reporting just straight facts related to incidents of white supremacism and white supremacy, interviewing experts on the topic rather than just pundits,” Braddock said. “It can be very difficult to distinguish the two but there seems to be a trend of people being interviewed who are from things like Twitter or they don't have a real knowledge of the dynamics of white supremacism or the psychology of far-right extremism, but instead, they have a large Twitter following, and that can give us some false ideas about these phenomenon.” Braddock said. 

The path to Jan. 6 and beyond 

Braddock said that the media was prepared to cover the insurrection, but said to be wary of right-wing outlets trying to normalize what happened that day. The less that outlets editorialize on these issues, the better, he said. 

When the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol happened on Jan. 6, 2021, news organizations put to the test what they learned in the years since Unite the Right. Smyth said that journalists got up to speed quickly when covering the events at the capitol and did thorough reporting when discussing who the insurrectionists were and what their motivations were. 

What journalists do moving forward, he said, will be key. Smyth said having dedicated beats is helpful because it allows journalists to get to the heart of the matter and put movements and ideology in context.

“I think journalists are starting to see this threat and I think they're starting to get up to speed. And I think it's going to be very important to cover this going forward,” Smyth said.