White Supremacy

“There Are QAnon Believers in Congress”: Media Shifts to Covering Domestic Extremism

Newsrooms are shifting resources to deepen coverage of homegrown radicals in the wake of the storming of the Capitol.
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By PATRICK SEMANSKY/Getty Images.

To watch Joe Biden’s inauguration on television was to feel like you were watching a normal presidency for the first time in four years. The terrace of the Capitol building, which MAGA extremists stormed two weeks earlier, was filled with competent grown-ups, Democrats and Republicans alike. There was nary a charlatan or grifter or wackadoo in sight. (Not to mention all those people wearing masks like it was no big deal.) Contrary to our worst fears in the wake of the January 6 siege—and thanks to the gargantuan National Guard presence fortifying the halls of power—there were no mobs or confrontations or further attempts to overturn a free and fair election. It felt as if sanity had risen up to vanquish the madness.

And yet, things are anything but sane. The radicalization that was laid bare at the Capitol two weeks ago isn’t going to just disappear. There will be more demonstrations, more violence, more conspiracy theories coursing through the dark corners of the web. Homegrown extremism, catalyzed by the hypernationalistic and reality-resistant fervor of the Donald Trump presidency, has effectively gone mainstream, and the media is confronting that reality head-on. Subjects that were once a fringe element of the news cycle are now front and center: far-right hate groups (and their skirmishes with far-left agitators like antifa), anti-government militias, the cult-like grip of QAnon. It’s not so much a question of when there will be another Charlottesville, or Capitol siege, or plot to kidnap an elected official, but how soon?

“It’s a big story, and it will be a bigger story,” said Cameron Barr, a managing editor at The Washington Post. “We’ve seen rising momentum. We’ve seen that these issues, and in some cases these actions, have gained urgency and much greater prominence.”

The Post, like other news outlets, has paid closer attention to the extremist threat over the past few years, covering it through a variety of reporters whose beats are linked to it in some way. Then in November, the Post doubled down. It announced that Hannah Allam would be joining its national security team to focus on domestic terrorism full-time, a “new beat,” according to the paper’s press release, in which Allam “will report on the mainstreaming of hate and extremism, online radicalization that leads to real-world violence and the national security implications of the country’s polarization.” As Barr put it, “This is a deepening of coverage.”

Allam cultivated the extremism beat in her previous role at NPR, where she reported extensively on far-right militias and hate groups. She’s one in a growing group of reporters who have made names for themselves documenting this world in the Trump era—people like Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC News, Will Sommer of the Daily Beast, and Christopher Mathias of HuffPost. “[H]eadline after headline has described escalating acts of political violence committed by [Trump’s] supporters and by those who share his hateful worldview—headlines so frequent and relentless as to make them routine,” Mathias wrote in October, “and it feels urgent now, in the final weeks leading up to this presidential election, to revisit those stories, and to recount the scale and intensity of MAGA hate and terror.”

The reporter who has arguably become the most prominent chronicler of this intensely scary stuff is Elle Reeve. She first dabbled in the subject while writing for the Atlantic Wire back in 2012, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing. Since then, it’s been a sort of “ebb and flow,” as Reeve put it, in terms of news relevance.

The story that put Reeve on the map was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she embedded with a group of white supremacists. Reeve’s 22-minute documentary for HBO’s Vice News Tonight garnered massive national attention and won a Peabody Award. It also made Reeve a valuable commodity. In 2019, she was hired as a correspondent covering extremism and the far right for CNN. Her most recent assignment took her inside the mob that stormed the Capitol building.

“There are anti-fascist researchers who have told me this was a really galvanizing moment for the far right,” said Reeve, with a caveat: “I can’t predict the future, I can only tell you when I feel like things are significantly escalating.” Reeve was unequivocal when I asked her if she thinks extremism has gone mainstream. “Yes,” she said, emphatically. “There are QAnon believers in Congress.” She added, “This is a very unpleasant thing to cover, because everyone’s mad at you no matter what.” Her coverage is so jarring and uncomfortable for a lot of people, Reeve said, because “they want it to not be true.” 

The topic of covering extremism came up on CNN’s Reliable Sources this past Sunday, in a conversation with Christopher Krebs, the federal cybersecurity official fired by Trump for debunking the president’s election-fraud claims, and Alex Stamos, a former Facebook security chief who has partnered with Krebs in a new firm advising clients on cyber threats and information warfare. “One of the problems I think we’ll have around media coverage of this,” said Stamos, “is that the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, folks like that, that they will be given an outsized influence, and their messages will be amplified over and over again because their messages are extremely scary. Those groups need to be treated like ISIS effectively, right?”  

It’s not an unreasonable comparison, although there are some key differences, as New York Times managing editor Joe Kahn pointed out. For one thing, homegrown extremism in the United States has been “playing out to some extent in plain sight,” said Kahn, who oversaw coverage of global terrorism when he was the Times’s foreign editor. “There’s no hyper-secret ritual of initiation. As far as we know, this radicalization has largely occurred in public, and the challenge of it is to recognize that it has crossed the line, for some people, from hyper-partisan to being a law and order issue, and a domestic threat of insurrection and violence.”

It’s also a subject that intersects with many different areas of coverage, especially at a sprawling news operation like the Times, where national reporters cover these groups on the ground, tech reporters roam the swamps of Parler and Telegram, and national security reporters tackle the story vis-à-vis the law enforcement agencies where they are deeply sourced. Kahn expects that the Times will continue to cover extremism through this multipronged approach, perhaps eventually appointing a single editor who is responsible for coordinating the coverage across desks.

“What I’d like to make sure we don’t do this time,” he said, “is thinking of any of these things as being a one-off. This is something deeper. There are seriously radicalized groups around the country, with all these different names that are floating up. When you look at the history, Oklahoma City came years after Waco, the Capitol came years after Charlottesville. The radicalization doesn’t necessarily play out in a predictable pattern.”

At the Post, Barr similarly said there are about a dozen journalists involved in different aspects of this coverage. That’s on top of the firepower Allam will bring in reporting on extremism full-time. The beat may be new, but the urgency has been building for years. “This was very much in the air,” said Barr. “The polarization, the tendency toward a kind of sectarianism. We’ve all seen the tendency for this to express itself in the form of violence, so that drives our sense of urgency about the coverage.”

I asked Barr if he ever thought he’d be navigating a news cycle where the scenes playing out in the United States don’t look all that different from conflicts that American journalists have covered abroad. “It doesn’t shock me to be directing this kind of coverage or adding positions in order to do it,” he said. “But it does say something about where we are as a society.” 

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