The information denialism of the Brazilian extreme right
(English version of a Portuguese original using Google Translator and Grammarly)
The episode starring Brazilian Senator Marcos Do Val showed how the press still has great difficulty in dealing with the erratic and contradictory strategy adopted by the Brazilian and world extreme right in national and international public information.
By producing, in an almost industrial way, a large volume of data, facts and events without coherence, and credibility, disregarding the prevailing logic in the country’s political culture, the supporters of fascist-style populism transplant information denialism into the public space.
Right-wing extremists seek to sow informational disorientation among people through the proliferation of fake news produced by so-called hate bureaus, the constant use of contradictory statements and the unconvincing repetition of apologies.
The extreme-right insurrections in Brasília (2023) and Washington (2021), both in January, made it clear that there are two different trends in the use of mass media in political confrontations. Far-right groups are inspired by denialism and disorientation tactics while the mainstream press tends to lean on the values and norms of liberal democracy.
Right-wing extremists have so far failed to produce a set of ideas that could shape a structured political/ideological program. Its entire strategy is focused on the destruction and dismantling of existing structures and this also applies in the field of information and communication. The concern of groups like the Cabinet of Hate (1) has always been to spread doubt and uncertainty, based on the fact that insecurity breeds fear and fear breeds passivity.
The dilemma of the big newspapers is that they unconditionally follow traditional values, which leads them to treat authoritarian populism with a fascist bias from a conventional approach. This approach ends up conveying to the public the idea that right-wing extremists are irresponsible people, without any concern for logic and coherence. The result is an attitude of superiority that, in some cases, can be confused with arrogance and belittlement.
The erratic conservative Senator
Senator Marcos Do Val’s inconsistent and contradictory statements about former President Jair Bolsonaro’s involvement in a coup d’état confused public opinion, politicians and journalists. It was an extreme right-wing maneuver to try to reduce the impact of the congressman’s denunciations by creating a controversy around the politician’s behaviour.
Actions like this allow the extreme right to occupy strategic spaces on the agenda of debates in public opinion, with the involuntary complicity of various media outlets. It is a contemporary manifestation of the old phrase “Talk badly about me, but talk about me” attributed to the writer Oscar Wilde and used by populist politicians such as the former governors of São Paulo, Adhemar de Barros (1963–1966) and Paulo Maluf ( 1979–1982).
The main difficulty of the mainstream press is how to neutralize the destabilizing effect of the informative denialism strategy. The insistence on demanding logical arguments, linear and sequential reasoning, coherence and veracity has not yielded results because they follow rules and behaviours ignored by the extreme right. The main victim of all this conflict between opposing communication policies is the audience which is disoriented and, thus becomes vulnerable to the dissemination of false news, factoids and distorted contextualizations.
The option of the democratic press is to promote a clearer differentiation in its news agenda, betting on the search for solutions to the real problems of the population, precisely the weakest point of the far right’s communication strategy. A differentiated agenda will require a lot of creativity from journalism because the choice of topics needs to be fully in tune with the concrete difficulties of common people, especially those with lower incomes and the middle class. Theorizing about the advantages of democracy serves to mark out political spaces but is not very efficient in terms of retaining readers, listeners, viewers and Internet users.
A differentiated agenda will also demand that the press cease to be dependent on the concerns of governments, politicians and businessmen to highlight problems of the social base, regardless of the themes and concerns of parliamentarians, magistrates or members of the national, state or municipal executive branch. The press needs, above all, to realize that polemicizing with the information denialism of the extreme right leads to nothing but more confusion and doubts among people, contributing to undermining confidence in newspapers, magazines, radio, television news and news sites on the Web.
(1) The Hate Cabinet was a group of fake news producers attached to the office of former president Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme right supporter.
