ABSTRACT
The normalization of the far right transforms the contemporary socio-political landscape across western liberal democracies. This chapter contributes by presenting discourse and conversation analyses of the intersection between the strategies of far-right political actors and routine news reporting and interviewing. Four key strategies are identified: (1) denial and distancing from denigrating or face-threatening attributions of political identity, such as being racist, (2) tactical (re)positionings of the party in relation to a political mainstream, (3) reframing of political narratives in euphemistic language, and (4) the strategy of doublespeak. A case study of news reporting on the Sweden Democrats, during the critical period when the long-standing ‘cordon sanitaire’ that quarantined the party from mainstream politics was gradually broken up, shows how these normalizing strategies are efficiently propagated in the news and how journalism tends to be at a loss when dealing with these strategies. The practices of formally neutral news reporting and interviewing fail to inform the audience about the fundamental struggle of meaning in politics, and risks being exploited by political propaganda.
