ABSTRACT
Right-wing populist leaders across the globe reacted to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in two main ways: by lashing out at ‘foreigners’ for spreading the virus and blaming the mainstream media for spreading ‘bad news’. In this chapter, the author argues that a series of media policy failures and silences have taken place in Europe and North America that have further distorted our communications landscapes and worked to the advantage of parties and movements on the right. In reality, far from retaining independence from all vested interests and delivering a critical and robust public interest journalism, public service media are often far too implicated in and attached to existing elite networks of power to be able to offer an effective challenge to them. Media policy failures did not cause the rise of Trump, Bolsanaro, Modi, the Alternative for Germany, the People's Party in Austria, or indeed Brexit.
