Cross-National Evidence of Disproportionate Media Visibility for the Radical Right in the 2024 European Elections

TL;DR

This study systematically compares media coverage of political groups during the 2024 European elections, revealing disproportionate attention to the Radical Right across multiple countries and media outlets, especially in final campaign weeks.

Contribution

It provides a novel cross-national analysis of media visibility for political parties, combining computational and human classification methods to reveal structural biases.

Findings

Radical Right received more media attention than other groups.

Media coverage of right-leaning entities was disproportionate to electoral results.

Coverage of right-leaning parties increased in the final weeks of the campaign.

Abstract

This study provides a systematic comparative analysis of media visibility of different political families during the 2024 European Parliament elections. We analyzed close to 21,500 unique news from leading national outlets in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Portugal - countries with diverse political contexts and levels of media trust. Combining computational and human classification, we identified parties, political leaders, and groups from the article's URLs and titles, and clustered them according to European Parliament political families and broad political leanings. Cross-country comparison shows that the Mainstream and the Radical Right were mentioned more often than the other political groups. Moreover, the Radical Right received disproportionate attention relative to electoral results (from 2019 or 2024) and electoral projections, particularly in Austria, Germany, and Ireland. This imbalance increased in the final weeks of the campaign, when media influence on undecided voters is greatest. Outlet-level analysis shows that coverage of right-leaning entities dominated across news sources, especially those generating the highest traffic, suggesting a structural rather than outlet-specific pattern. Media visibility is a central resource, and this systematic mapping of online coverage highlights how traditional media can contribute to structural asymmetries in democratic competition.