For nearly a decade, journalists have wrestled with a deceptively simple question: Does covering extremists expose them or empower them? The debate came to a head after 2017’s Unite the Right rally, when images of torch-bearing white nationalists in Charlottesville forced newsrooms into a painful reckoning. Reporters had done what they were trained to do — show the public what was happening. But in doing so, they also delivered exactly what the marchers wanted: more visibility for their spectacle, and a sense of cultural relevance. The tiki torches and chants were not just expressions of ideology. They were media strategies.
With Heather Heyer’s body barely cold and her mother still making heartbreaking television appearances, the New York Times published a profile of an Ohio welder named Tony Hovater, co-founder of a neo-Nazi organization whose members had marched through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” The Times followed up with a report on Hovater’s fondness for “Seinfeld,” his wedding registry at Target, four cats and Midwestern manners that would, as reporter Richard Fausset wrote, “please anyone’s mother.”
