For the past few years, reporting on far-right extremism and misinformation has been a messy free-for-all. Sure, there have been some attempts to delineate best practices, and certain approaches to storytelling, such as those that seem to normalize neo-Naziism, have come under harsh criticism. But few rules have guided the new genre of reporting—and, to date, no one has taken a hard look at how that reporting may be complicit in spreading far-right messaging and helping the movement grow.

Until now. A new report titled “The Oxygen of Amplification” offers an unprecedented look at the fundamental paradox of reporting on the so-called “alt-right”: Doing so without amplifying that ideology is extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. The report comes out of the Data & Society research institute’s Media Manipulation Initiative, and is written by Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Internet Culture. It draws on in-depth conversations with dozens of journalists (including WIRED's Emma Grey Ellis, who reports frequently on the topic) to illustrate an uncomfortable truth: Journalists inadvertently helped catalyze the rapid rise of the alt-right, turning it into a story before it was necessarily newsworthy.

Now, there’s no turning back. “We have to deal with the reality of a highly visible, activated, far-right element in our culture,” Phillips says. But there are ways for journalists to do better.

It's not that the reporting was done in bad faith or ill-intentioned; many people thought that holding up a light to the hatred of white supremacist groups would force them to go away. But that didn’t happen. “If it were true that light disinfected, the alt-right would not have taken off in the way it did,” Phillips says. Instead, the very act of exposure, combined with stories that unwittingly framed extremism as a victimless novelty, legitimized and empowered an otherwise fringe perspective.

The report also details how, even as white nationalism was thrust into the national spotlight, some journalists had trouble taking it seriously. Phillips discusses the impact of “internet culture,” or “meme culture,” on digital natives’ ability to spot extremist content; she describes one former reporter at The Daily Dot who joined a Facebook group called Donald Trump’s Dank Meme Stash and did not at first realize that most of the content was not, in fact, satirical.

That assumption of irony is typical of many people raised around internet culture, says Ryan Milner, an assistant professor of communication at the College of Charleston who, along with Phillips, co-authored the book The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Blanket irony, which Milner describes as "watching something from a distance and being able to detach yourself from its reality and its depth and its nuance,” was hard to break—and by the time many journalists realized the non-ironic, non-satirical truth about what was happening, the damage had already been done.

Where Does the Media Go From Here?

The study is careful not to lay blame place at the feet of individual reporters, instead seeking to address structural flaws in the way many outlets think about extremism and extremists. In doing so, “The Oxygen of Amplification” lays out several criteria for determining newsworthiness, such as: Has a given meme been shared beyond just the members of the group that created it? If not, Phillips writes, “all reporting will do is provide oxygen, increasing the likelihood that it will reach the tipping point.” In the case of the so-called alt right as a whole, that’s exactly what’s happened: in amplifying alt-right ideology even in cases where it wasn’t necessarily newsworthy, journalists made it newsworthy. But by keeping that tipping point calculus in mind going forward, journalists can help avoid the continuation of a vicious cycle.