Traditional media also govern with words

Words rarely come alone. They drag images, judgments, and emotions that start to work before we can examine them. That is why there is a huge difference between describing someone and classifying them. A description invites the reader to judge; a classification can deliver the finished judgment. Whoever manages to name their opponent gains an advantage before the discussion begins.

Elon Musk reopened that debate by stating that far right became a particularly popular propaganda term in recent years. His comment was accompanied by a chart showing a marked difference between the presence of far right and far left. The viral chart can be debated methodologically. What is interesting is that much broader research detected a similar asymmetry.

David Rozado and Eric Kaufmann analyzed over 30 million articles from 54 U.S. and British media outlets published between 1970 and 2019. They found that references to political extremism increased, but terms associated with the far right grew particularly since 2008 and appear in most media much more frequently than their far-left equivalents.

The finding does not prove that every use of “far right” is incorrect. Nor does it prove that behind every writing there is an order to favor socialism. Politics produced real phenomena that explain part of that coverage. But it does allow us to pose a question that traditional journalism rarely asks itself: who determines where a legitimate position ends and where extremism begins.

There lies the true power of a label. “Lower taxes” describes a proposal. “Far-right policy” also incorporates a valuation of who proposes it. “Control immigration” identifies a policy; “extremist agenda” indicates beforehand how the reader should interpret it. The fact may remain intact while the framework from which it will be understood changes completely.

A study published this year in European Political Science offers another clue. Georgios Samaras studied 140 articles from seven major English-speaking media outlets and found classification problems, label inflation, and ambiguity in the journalistic use of hard-right. His work warns that different movements can end up compressed under imprecise categories that lose analytical capacity.

This mechanism is particularly effective because it does not require censorship. The reader can access all the facts and yet receive them within a previously constructed framework. The selection of language establishes which ideas belong to the realm of the debatable and which must enter the conversation accompanied by a moral warning.

The asymmetry matters precisely for that reason. When certain positions are systematically described using extreme categories while others receive more benign labels, the political center ceases to be merely an electoral reality. It also becomes a linguistic construction. What was conservative yesterday can become radical overnight without changing a single proposal.

The mistake would be to imagine a gigantic coordinated conspiracy among journalists. It is not necessary. Newsrooms share training, sources, professional conventions, and incentives. Moreover, alarmist language captures attention. Stories can emerge spontaneously from an ideologically homogeneous ecosystem without anyone needing to draft instructions from a central office.

This also explains why journalism loses credibility when it abandons description and assumes the role of moral arbiter. Its function ceases to be providing information for citizens to form a judgment and gradually shifts to providing the judgment along with the information.

The discussion, then, is not about banning “far right” or mechanically replacing it with “far left.” It consists of recovering a much more demanding discipline: defining, contextualizing, and demonstrating before labeling. Journalism confident in its arguments should need fewer adjectives and more facts.

Because there is a boundary that all press should fear crossing. When words cease to help us understand reality and begin to indicate who the good guys are before knowing the arguments, journalism is no longer telling the story. It is trying to decide its meaning.