How The Times, the BBC and The Guardian Responded to the Le Pen news

It Ain't Good

Something predictable happened. That is, if you're unfortunate enough to be someone like me who insists on trying to hold media outlets accountable for the content they publish.

Let's get into it.

Marine Le Pen, the Voldemort lookalike (not to be confused with Geert Wilders, the Malfoy lookalike) who is also the most well-known far right figure in France, was found guilty on Monday of embezzling EU funds. As a result, she is barred from standing in an election for 5 years.

That is the story. That's it. She did a crime and was found guilty of doing said crime.

We can now move on secure in the knowledge that our media overlords will do their due diligence and report on the news.

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I am in a funny mood.

Of course, that is not what happened.

Let's explore how three British papers have covered this story: The Times, The BBC and The Guardian.

The Times (owned by Rupert Murdoch)

The Times published an editorial saying that Le Pen facing consequences is bad for democracy. Their words: “Barring Marine Le Pen from the presidential election will inflame tensions.” You might be reasonably expecting, given such a headline, that they provide evidence for such a big claim. You would be wrong. They just say it will.

In addition to the editorial, they have published five articles since yesterday on Le Pen. Here are the headlines, with quick comments of what each sentence, on its own, implies:

• “Le Pen vows to fight election ban after embezzlement conviction.”

  • Le Pen is combative, a rebel. She ‘vows to fight'. She is the underdog. (Note: they have two headlines for this one, the other one is “Marine Le Pen banned from politics after €4m embezzlement conviction.” Here is the one I mentioned archived.)

• “Is the Le Pen verdict a left-wing plot? Some voters may think so.”

  • The tone is nefarious, of course. There is a plot, maybe. We are ‘just asking questions.’ And here are a selected handful of voters whose opinions matter more than the voters who would disagree with this assessment. The former camp, the one we like, is the one we will platform. We are building a story here, and the story needs a hero - Le Pen - with representatives of ‘the real people’.

• “Abuse by MEPs is widespread — few end up in court like Le Pen.”

  • This problem isn't that big of a deal anyway. So many other MEPs also abuse the system. There must be a special reason for why Le Pen was convicted. Let us not ask the harder question: why is it that easy for MEPs to abuse the system?

• An interview with her second in command: “Jordan Bardella: immigrants’ son to French far-right poster boy.”

  • We are framing Bardella the way he wants to frame himself. He is the son of immigrants, which gives him a pass to go after other immigrants. He is the kind of son-of-immigrants we like, the kind that is happy to uphold the status quo.

• “Trial verdict is life or death for our movement, says Marine Le Pen.”

  • The tone is nefarious, even more serious. It is a matter of life or death. The far right dying would be bad, of course. Why would you think otherwise? There is no context here. Le Pen isn't part of an old legacy that has its roots in Nazi collaborators. She's not the one who is on record saying France is not responsible for France rounding up French Jews and sending them to Nazi concentration camps (she is) despite her claiming that she had cut off all ideological ties to her Holocaust denying Nazi dad.

If you read all pieces, which you shouldn't because it's bad for your mental health, you will find no extensive investigation into the accusation itself. You will mainly just be aware that there is a conviction, for some reason.

Okay, fine. But that's The Times though. They're owned by Murdoch. They clearly are aligned with the Voldemorts of this world.

Let's move on.

The BBC

Now, how did the BBC cover it? One by one:

• Le Pen to appeal ban from running for public office, condemning 'political decision' (archived). Subtitle: Marine Le Pen has criticised a court ruling that bans her from running for public office as a "political decision" and says she will appeal.

  
  The featured image (archived) is a screenshot of her appearance on French programme ‘Le20h’ on TF1. The subtitle that the BBC chose to write gives Le Pen the mic. She is the one doing the criticizing and she gets to denounce the ruling as a ‘political decision,’ obviously implying that there is a plot to take her down - unrelated to her embezzling EU money (while being the anti-EU politician.) To be fair, the BBC does mention that “at the start of the reading of the verdict, the judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis, said Le Pen had been at the "heart of the system" which saw the embezzlement of €2.9m” but that is only if you get halfway through the article, after reading Le Pen's extensive statement as well as Bardella's call for protests.

• Le Pen's right-wing European allies condemn court verdict as threat to democracy (archived).

  
  The featured image (archived, now changed) is of three men famous for their love of democracy: Hungary's Viktor Orban, the Netherlands’ Draco Malfoy and Italy's Matteo Salvini. I almost feel like I don't need to expand on this one. The decision to feature the notoriously corrupt, Putin-loving Orban being upset that his French equivalent (who also received a €6 million from Russian company Aviazapchast that her party paid back in 2023) is facing some accountability is, well, a decision. That's a decision that an editor at the BBC made.

  

  So what are the other BBC headlines on Le Pen since yesterday? No worries, I got you:

• (1) Decision day in court for Marine Le Pen's French presidential hopes

• (2) 'Le Pen decision making some nervous about French democracy'

• (3) Shock Le Pen verdict rocks French far right

• (4) Marine Le Pen attacks five-year ban from running for public office as 'political decision'

The first and third one are ‘neutral’ enough, so I don't have much to say on them. The fourth one is a repetition of the Le Pen vowing to fight discourse. The second one? That one's interesting. Let's dig in:

Some people are nervous about the consequences that being held accountable for committing a crime might have on democracy. The BBC isn't saying that it's bad that she was convicted, but, surely we need to know who are the people in ‘some people are nervous.’

(who are these people?)

It's a 55 seconds clip, so we will hopefully find out who these people are pretty quickly. Nope. It's just the guy from the BBC talking to the camera, and telling you that (the actual quote): “it makes a lot of people in France rather nervous about the implications for democracy.” Why did they say some people? There will obviously be some people angry, other people happy. Why did they choose to mention those that are ‘nervous’ if not to drive home this discourse that, once again, there is something nefarious about this conviction?

Unless you believe that certain people are owned an exemption from the law, this story is barely a story. Sure, there are consequences for the elections because she wants to run in them, but the story remains this, to quote the judge again: “Le Pen had been at the "heart of the system" which saw the embezzlement of €2.9m.”

Here are some angles that could be explored but - from what I have seen so far - have not: what does embezzling this much money mean in a country that is supposedly going through an economic crisis? Is Le Pen's party ready to tackle the fact that she is committed a crime? If not, what does it do to a democracy if one of its main parties rejects any kind of accountability? Is this the sign of a thriving democracy or one that is at risk? What do experts of the far right have to say about this story? What might this mean for immigrants and people of colour, in particular Muslims, given that Le Pen's party has repeatedly targeted them?

Just a few suggestions.

Now, The Guardian.

The Guardian

I'm going to do something different here. I will first give you some background on The Guardian's history of badly covering the far right, and I will end this piece by going through how they have covered the Le Pen story.

If you don't know, I have some history of complaining about this specific problem that some academics have identified with regards to The Guardian's coverage. By some, I mean Aurelien Mondon and Katy Brown (you see, unlike the BBC, I have real people in mind when I say ‘some people’) because in 2020 they published a paper for the Political Studies Association entitled Populism, the media, and the mainstreaming of the far right: The Guardian’s coverage of populism as a case study.

Damn, that seems relevant to a story about a known far right figure. The paper is even open-access, so reading it is fairly easy. The Guardian, which clearly views itself as having higher standards than most, would have surely included the conclusions of such a paper to avoid repeating the mistakes the paper identifies.

You will know by now, from the general tone of this article, that - spoilers - they haven't.

In fact, Mondon and Brown were in touch with The Guardian, whose representative informed the academics that they'd be interested in reading the paper. The academics sent the paper, and The Guardian proceeded to ignore it. No responses. That was five years ago. In that time period, I have interviewed Aurelien Mondon twice on The Fire These Times.

I think The Guardian has more resources available to it than ‘guy with a laptop and a mic who makes $500 a month’, and somehow my track record is better - with, I promise you, little effort. I just read the paper, prepared questions, and then engaged in a productive conversation with one of its authors. My biases are obvious and usually stated upfront: I believe that the influence of power and money on our media institutions is really bad for democracy, and I am a fan of democracy. You can take my biases into consideration when listening to the podcast, and this would allow you to form an opinion about me and my intentions. Do you know why The Guardian, the one which is ostensibly also concerned about fascism and democracy, has not responded to these academics and integrated their findings? I don't.

(Sidenote: The two episodes are number 82 (June 2021) “the Populist Hype, ‘the People’ and the Far Right” and number 163 (July 2024) “the Far Right is Not Inevitable.” Find them by writing The Fire These Times on any podcast platform and then looking for the numbers, or just ‘Mondon’ as your keyword.)

To make matters worse, you don't even have to read the entire paper by Mondon and Brown (but you should) because the abstract lays out the problem they've identified pretty clearly: it's about the populist hype, aka the pervasive usage of the term ‘populism’ when describing the far right. The academics even gave us three easy-to-remember ways that media outlets, in this case The Guardian, mainstream the far right. Again, that's in the abstract, the bit at the top. I'll include a brief explanation of each, although they are fairly straightforward.

Note that this are how I would explain them. You can check out the paper itself for how Mondon and Brown explain them, although I do quote them below as well.

1. Agenda-setting power and deflection

Essentially, this is about framing. If you frame something in a certain way, it does not mean that you're claiming it is the only way to frame it. What it does mean is that you made a decision to frame it in a certain way. The Guardian opted to label a certain type of actor and idea with the attribute of ‘populist’ instead of “alternative signifiers such as racist, socialist, far right, or far left.” You see, the English language already has words that explain someone who supports racist politics. The word is racist. It does not mean that this is the only way to describe things, but not using a word that is already understood is a choice. And the question is why. If something or someone is racist, what are we doing by not using this specific word to describe that something or someone? Are we describing something or someone more or less accurately?

It's also about priming, which is linked to framing. The Guardian has opted to draw “attention to the ‘populist’ element at the expense of others” (such as racism) and this matters because it “occupied a certain amount of space as well as a particular position in what is a finite and hierarchised ability to produce and consume news and analysis.” In other words, the decision to publish 2,000 articles in a year with the word populism (see below), other framings (again, such as racism) are deprioritised. This does not mean that none of the 2,000 articles should have had such a framing, but it calls into question the decision to publish this many at the expense of other framings.

And yes, Mondon and Brown point out that The Guardian went from publishing 300 articles on ‘populism’ in 1998 to 2,000 articles in 2016. What the outlet fails to acknowledge, essentially, is simply its own role in making that happen. As they point out:

If the newspaper turned to populism, it was assumed without any self-reflection that it was because (a) ‘populist’ parties and politics were on the rise, (b) their readership wanted to read about ‘populism’, and (c) the said coverage had no impact on populist parties and politics and their potential rise or fall.

Again: editorial choices “firmly rest with editorial boards” whereas The Guardian “acted as if it were an objective and removed actor.” In other words, The Guardian adopted realism as their modus operandi. I'll expand on this another time, but you can get an intro to realism in one of my recent pieces:

Okay now number 2:

2. Euphemisation and trivialisation

The easiest way to explain this is through a 2019 article cited in the paper in which The Guardian described the far-right German AfD party as ‘anti-immigrant populists.’ It shouldnt be too controversial to wonder why the word ‘racist’ wasn't instead used, given that the article itself, written by Kate Connoly, mentions sentences such as “stoking hatred with anti-Jewish rhetoric” and “Nazi slogans and death threats” and “who was accused of contributing to the antisemitic sentiment behind the Halle attack” and “calling Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame.”

Is ‘anti-immigrant populist’ best way to describe a German far-right party deeply involved in antisemitism and Holocaust denial? Why not describe them as antisemites since that is what ‘stoking hatred with anti-Jewish rhetoric’ means? That is literally what that means, so why did Connoly (and the editor(s) that greenlit this piece) make the decision to not call them that? Even after mentioning the AfD's obvious ties to Nazi politics, The Guardian opted to end the article with: “The AfD was formed in 2014 as an anti-establishment force opposed to the euro.” The article starts with ‘populist’ and ends with ‘anti-establishment,’ while the actual content of the article makes it clear that these are racists.

The AfD's antisemitism, chauvinism, racism and xenophobia is therefore downplayed, euphemized and triviliazed. Instead of you, the reader, understanding that party to be a threat to democracy - which is evidently is - you can be forgiven to conclude that they are a more ‘normal’ than they may seem. Sure, they have bad apples here and there, but don't all parties have extremists? That's what makes articles like that one so damaging, and The Guardian does that a lot.

3. Amplification

This is also straightforward. The Guardian publishes “countless articles warning of its (the far right's) impending rise, even when this did not manifest in electoral results.” This happened with the last French elections, which actually saw an impressive victory by a leftwing coalition. In the run-up to the election, The Guardian published a piece entitled “‘We want our peace’: why is France’s far-right support such a rural affair?” with the extraordinary subtitle: “Media rhetoric about migrants and crime is rallying support for the National Rally in the countryside but, say city folk, the reality is different.” The implication here is that The Guardian has no role to play in such amplifications, but the article itself does just that.

The piece describes the impending “political transformation” that would turn the far right into “the biggest force.” This was wrong. The far right didn't even come in second. They came in third. The Guardian published two pieces immediately following the results calling this a “shock win” and “surprise win.” But why? Why was it surprising? And where is the mea culpa for getting it very wrong? The pieces in The Guardian articles complaining about ‘the media’ and ‘media rhetoric’ ring a tad hollow when one is faced with their role in the populist hype. This doesn't necessarily imply that they are evil, of course. It just means they need to have better accountability, and that they need to actually talk to the academics who study them. If The Guardian wants to be better than the rest, and an actual force for democracy, it needs to be willing to look itself in the mirror.

The Le Pen coverage

With this in mind, how would you expect their coverage of Le Pen to be? I will start by giving credit where it's due. Unlike The Times, The Guardian's editorial was uncompromising: The Guardian view on the Marine Le Pen verdict: no politician is above the law. Good. No notes. Okay almost: they do call her, yet again, a populist leader. They only do so once though, compared to using the term ‘far right' twice, so that's something?

These are the articles:

• ‘This will backfire’: Le Pen allies hit out at Paris court’s 2027 election ban verdict

  If you were wondering from the title who actually said ‘this will backfire’ it's… Elon Musk. That famous politics understander who gets things right - that Elon Musk. His take is the headline The Guardian went for.
  
  How did The Guardian describe your Musks and your Orbans? You've gotten this far, so you've guessed it: “Nationalist and populist figures around the world.”
  
  Musk is now a populist and/or nationalist, everyone. There are apparently no other descriptors that can be used for the man who did a Sieg Heil, pushes antisemitic and White supremacist conspiracy theories on the platform he owns and is actively supporting far right parties around the world other than ‘populist’ or ‘nationalist’. White nationalist might work here, but that's not the term they use. Populist? The richest man in the world and one of the most consistently disliked politicians according to basically any poll is a populist? The guy who is destroying public services? Of which country is he a nationalist for? He only recently jumped on board the maga train.

• French far right calls for nationwide protests against Marine Le Pen ban. Here's the subtitle: “National Rally president says French electorate ‘must be outraged’ at judgment that would ‘rob’ them of a voice”

  Again: The RN's president is obviously not happy that the main face of the RN was convicted of embezzlement.

  
  So with that in mind, let us dissect the choice of words. The Guardian tells us that not only is Bardella himself not happy, but that he thinks the French electorate “must be outraged.” Bardella, as a prominent member of the far right, has a very clear and distinctive idea of who counts as the French electorate. In fact, he has a very clear and distinctive idea of who counts as French, period. The Guardian just gave him a free quote that does nothing to explain what the situation actually is. What it does do, yet again, is equivocate the far right with ‘the people.’ This is then made clearer when we are told, by the Guardian, that Bardella thinks the “French electorate” will no longer have a “voice.” Again, strip down the sentence for what it is: the people have a voice, and one voice only, because there is only one people, and the people's voice is the far right.
  

• Marine Le Pen attacks ban on French presidency run as a ‘political decision’

I think I don't need to do this one again, right? Le Pen is defiant, rebellious, she “vows to fight”, etc etc.

Meanwile, as The Guardian also reported, the judge who convicted Le Pen is receiving death threats. No mentions of the word populist in this piece. Hurray!

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I am now tired so:

To end on a note of irony, The Guardian actually published a piece by Peter Neville entitled “Populists like Trump are aided by the media” in January of 2025. This is absolutely true, not the yet-again overuse of the term ‘populist’ instead of existing terms (see the previous million words I wrote in this piece) but the second bit: they are indeed aided by the media. The Guardian needs to take responsibility for its role in aiding them as well.