Shifting Realities
NUI Galway
The Banality of Fascism on Fox News: Tracing Tucker Carlson’s Embrace of the Great Replacement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Meghan Conroy, Hanah Stiverson
On April 8, 2021, Tucker Carlson—the most-watched cable news host on US television—argued that American citizens’ rights were being stolen by immigrants and “outsiders.” Positioning this as a “voting rights question,” rather than racially motivated, he stated, “If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised.” His language echoes the Great Replacement Theory, a core white supremacist worldview that has inspired violent extremists on a global scale. Through a discourse analysis of Great Replacement-related content espoused on Carlson’s show over the course of 2020 and 2021, this paper builds upon prior work on conservative news cultures to examine the role of Fox News in perpetuating an increasingly commonplace yet insidious ideology. This method allows us to explore not only the narratives crafted and disseminated by Fox News, but also the relational dynamics between the content creators, the audience, legacy and new media, and the media content itself. Responding to a distinct need to understand the current socio-political crises promoted by media networks, our paper provides an analysis of the affective discourse used to strengthen a reactionary base against a set of fictionalized threats. By doing so, our work examines the transition that media content such as this has made from banal nationalism to banal fascism, exporting the qualities of fascism to an audience primed for extremist content.
The Role of Social Media Use in the Sudanese Uprising, 2018: An Exploratory Study
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mustafa Taha
This study uses Christensen’s (1997) technology disruption theory and Castells’ (1996) theory of network society to explain the influence of social media in political change in Sudan. It provides an anatomy of the role of social media in the Sudanese revolution that toppled the dictatorial rule of Gen. Omer Al-Bashir on April 11, 2019. Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes in Darfur. His pro-Islamic government controlled the media and suppressed the opposition. Bashir's brute force failed to pacify an internal popular discontent and an external approbation. The Sudanese protesters used social media as an alternative media (Haas, 2004; Chan, 2017) to organize massive demonstrations that led to the downfall of Bashir’s authoritarian rule. The study used 30 in-depth interviews to explore the opinions of the Sudanese people, namely the young generation, about the use of social media during the Sudanese revolution. The study found that social media played important roles in informing, organizing, and mobilizing young men and women during the protests (Leung and Lee, 2014). Some interviewees suggest that the revolution could not have happened without social media. The majority of the interviewees state that the internet blackout was meant to hide the atrocities committed during the brutal dispersal of the sit-in in front of the General Command of the Armed Forces. They state that the protesters used mobile phones, SMS, and pamphlets during the blackout. The study contributes to an emerging scholarly inquiry into the role that social media play in cyber-activism.
Press-party Relationship and Democracy in South Korea
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ki Sung Kwak
This paper examines how partisanship and progressive-conservative divisions have influenced the media (press in particular) and the relationship between the press and political parties in South Korea (Korea hereafter) since the 1990s when the nation achieved democracy. In order to better understand this dynamic, the paper first identifies the major features of the Korean press which help explain the complex interplay between the press and political parties in Korea. It then examines the way in which the legacy of authoritarianism has affected the media practice and the press-party relationship. This is followed by a discussion on its implications for the nation’s democracy.
