For the second installment of the News Literacy Edition of the NPR Public Editor newsletter, we're exploring how NPR defines extremism and uses the word in its reporting. The threat of extremism is not new to the United States. Throughout our country's history, domestic and external groups, driven by their ideology, have hatched plots and attacked people.
News consumers are sometimes confused or frustrated by coverage of extremism, because it's not always clear why the reporter or the newsroom selected one particular story. We often get audience questions about how and why NPR's reporters cover extremism and when they actually apply the label extremism or extremist.
We learned that journalists who cover extremism often set out to inform the public about individuals or groups who experts believe pose a threat. Reporters will expose recruitment tactics, describe financial resources and quantify the potential risk. While doing all this, reporters strive to avoid amplifying misinformation or glorifying bad people.
Last fall, for example, NPR's Embedded podcast looked into the military's efforts to address extremism in its ranks through the story of an active-duty Marine who was in the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Just a few weeks ago, President Donald Trump eliminated efforts to investigate extremism in the military.)
We interviewed the supervising editor for national security at NPR and a national security correspondent about how NPR defines and approaches stories about extremism.
NPR has covered a broad spectrum of extremist views. In January, Morning Edition host Leila Fadel interviewed extremism researcher Eviane Leidig about how some social media influencers embrace antifeminist and white nationalist views in their lifestyle content. A recent All Things Considered story by Odette Yousef, NPR's domestic extremism correspondent for the national security team, examined a political playbook against transgender people who are falsely identified as responsible for shootings and other tragedies like the recent collision between a military helicopter and a passenger plane. Last year NPR covered the response to extremism in European politics.
Complications around defining extremism
But even as NPR covers extremism, using the term poses problems because it means different things to different people. In 2021, for example, members of the U.S. intelligence community had warned of the increased threat of militia extremist groups in the country. Furthermore, covering such a topic is complicated by the fact that extremism isn't relegated to one place: it can be either domestic or international.
"It's one of the most challenging questions of our times, to define extremism, because we've seen the boundaries blurred when it comes to our politics, our language, across many different domains about what's considered extremist," said Andrew Sussman, supervising editor for national security at NPR. "And we've seen those questions and those definitions being kind of tossed about in a deeply polarized age."
Sussman noted that we now see people lobbing the extremism charge at others. At the same time, he added, addressing the challenge of domestic extremism has been very real. He pointed to the rise of militias in the Obama era, and the white nationalist movement coming to the fore and catching the nation's attention during a rally in Charlottesville, Va.
"We began to see the normalization of certain tropes and ideas that existed on the fringes, like 'great replacement' theory that has now been kind of moved into the political bloodstream. And you hear mainstream political figures and others kind of pick up that language," Sussman said. "There is a sense that reporters across the board are covering different elements of extremism, and it's no longer just confined to the fringes, or even to kind of recognized groups and movements, because I think it's about a broader question of radicalization and what that means."
Covering extremism versus defining extremism
Another added challenge is that some of the very people who hold extremist views do not view themselves in that light. For Sussman, the key is to look for dehumanizing rhetoric and "othering." "This is something that you see in extremist language and ideology. But I think we have to recognize that the boundaries are so blurred now by what's considered extremist."
Greg Myre, a national security correspondent for NPR with a focus on the intelligence community sees extremism through the international lens. He notes that defining extremism is less helpful than covering the actions of extremists. "I'm not saying there's a definitive answer, but if I were debating this I might say extremism is advocating some sort of illegal action or illegal behavior," he said. "Even if it's not violence, trying to kill people, but some other sort of illegal activity."
On the topic of extremism, we received this query:
Timothy Larsen wrote on Dec. 12, 2024: I was surprised and disappointed that gatherings of politically conservative Christians for rally worship services during the election were being covered by a domestic extremism reporter.
This Weekend Edition Saturday two-way interview between a host and reporter last October described an upcoming event that aimed to gather a million women to fast and pray on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Host Scott Simon spoke with Odette Yousef, who described "A Million Women" as the national culmination of dozens of state-based rallies that were held last year under the tagline "Don't Mess With Our Kids." She cited concern over the gathering from Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.
In a follow-up email to our team, Larsen, the NPR listener, noted that "A Million Women" had among its sponsors "the Assemblies of God, a denomination with over 86 million adherents worldwide." He objected to connecting the gathering to extremism.
The headline of the story signaled that extremism experts were keeping tabs on this event and Yousef leaned on those experts in her reporting. The introduction to the digital version of the story reads: "A conservative Christian gathering on the National Mall Saturday aims to bring together anti-LGTBQ, anti-abortion, and QAnon activists."
Yousef noted in the segment that the event wasn't explicitly political. She did say that likely attendees included "Moms for Liberty types" and "people who want to see a national abortion ban." Citing Taylor again, Yousef described the connection between the event organizers, Jenny Donnelly and Lou Engle, to the New Apostolic Reformation, a collection of nondenominational charismatic churches and leaders with close ties to President Donald Trump. In a February 2024 story, Yousef reported that the NAR movement espouses "Seven Mountain theology," a belief that Christians should assert control over seven areas of public life: family, religion, government, education, arts and entertainment, commerce and media. Taylor described it as "a structured outline for Christian supremacy."
We asked Sussman for his thoughts on discerning between conservative Christianity and extremism. He said the team's framework for understanding whether a movement is extremist or not falls in line with many scholars and researchers who specialize in this topic.
"They define extremist movements as ones that adopt stark definitions of who is in the 'in-group,' and who is in the 'out-group,' and go further by advocating for harm (whether by violence, stripping of civil or human rights, or discrimination) to those in the out-group," he explained later in an email. "That harm element is key, and this falls far outside most ideologies and beliefs, be they liberal or conservative."
Extremism in the mainstream
Looking ahead, Sussman said his team is currently working on a project with the Pulitzer Center that examines "how extremist rhetoric and ideology have gone mainstream, through the work of extremist groups and influencers, and in the growing numbers of Americans who see political violence as an answer to the country's problems."
This shift, he said in an email, manifests locally, on school boards, and in libraries. — Amaris Castillo
The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Emily Barske Wood and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.
Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute
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