The far and extreme right in documentaries: euphemisation, exceptionalisation, and humanisation

Much debate has taken place recently on the way in which far and extreme right actors are portrayed by mainstream media. Building on an international corpus of 30 documentaries, we combine discourse theory, corpus linguistics, and multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine how far and extreme right actors are portrayed in documentaries, a format of growing discursive importance which has been under-researched thus far. Our analysis contributes in particular to the fledgling literature on the role played by the media in the mainstreaming of racism and the far right. Crucially, it illuminates how processes of euphemisation, exceptionalisation and humanisation can lead to the legitimisation of politics otherwise opposed by the filmmakers. Beyond mapping such processes and building on more positive approaches in the field, we formulate recommendations for best practices when engaging with the far and extreme right in documentaries.