Search

The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.

Political communication has taken new and complex forms within the contemporary hybrid media system. In this article, we examine how political campaigning that draws on television news forms utilises the increasingly blurred boundaries between news journalism and politics online. We assess the digital television news channel Riks, which during the 2022 national election was operated by the Sweden Democrats party and distributed via YouTube. Deploying a mixed-methods approach, we analysed all videos published by Riks four weeks prior to the election. Results show that Riks blends descriptive, interpretative, and outrage genres, and strategically frames the most important political issues of the election campaign in favour of the party’s policies. Hence, the study contributes to political communication scholarship by emphasising how news has become an integral part of strategic party communication, challenging established scholarly conceptualisations of alternative media and hyperpartisan news.

Over the last decade, strategic attacks on news media institutions and journalists have become an increasingly common feature of populist political communication. The purpose of this article is to identify various strategies that politicians use to criticise the news media and illuminate how the use and circulation of these strategies vary between party types. The article builds on a content analysis of the Twitter feeds of all members of parliament with an active account during the 2018 Swedish election campaign. Results show that political media criticism in Sweden is strongly associated with political personalisation, and it is almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon, though not restricted specifically to populist parties. Public service media rather than newspapers or commercial broadcasters constitute the prime target for political media criticism in Sweden, illustrating the need to take media systemic aspects in to account when analysing media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication.

Over the last couple of decades, Europe has undergone fundamental political transformations that have challenged old stereotypes about the ‘essence’ of the European identity. This article analyses televisual narratives of the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, turning the analytical spotlight on two of Europe’s largest news broadcasters: BBC World and Euronews. The article focuses on how Europe is remembered in the news, but also how references to the past are used to explain what Europe is today and what it might look like in the future.

This article explores how political parties and individual politicians in Sweden communicate strategically in an online environment where the close relationship between news and journalistic institutions no longer can be taken for granted. We define the adoption and adaption of journalistic conventions in political communication as a particular communication style, conceptualized as "parasitic news". The article presents an analytical framework that explicates the role of parasitic news across five dimensions: ideological transparency/position, alternativeness, news genres, individual vs. collective media practices, and social media affordances. An analysis of three news projects, representing right-wing populist, liberal/conservative, and left-wing/green ideological positions, reveals that parasitic news is a flexible communication style that blurs the boundaries of politics and media in online spaces. Moreover, parasitic news challenges the relevance of established terms such as alternative, hyper-partisan, and fake news, pointing to the need of a renewed conceptual vocabulary in journalism, media and political communication research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, data journalism has received considerable attention among scholars, pointing to novel forms of investigative reporting as well as new daily practices of news production. This study contributes to existing scholarship by conceptualizing data journalism through distinctions between hard and soft news in relation to service journalism. We analyze news produced by specialized data desks in Swedish public service organizations over a 5-year period (2015–2019) and propose a model for how service journalism attributes can be used as a bridge between the binary categories of hard and soft in data journalism. With this model, we point to how data journalism in public service organizations challenges established notions of soft and hard news and how hybrid production practices open up new research trajectories concerning the societal significance of news in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to map and scrutinize developments within Swedish cultural journalism, with a particular focus on transformations in genres, text types and thematic repertoires. Drawing on a constructed week sample from press, television and radio during four decades (1985, 1995, 2005, 2015), we address three aspects of 'the crisis discourse' of cultural journalism: (1) the potential decline in cultural coverage due to economic cutbacks and downsized cultural desks; (2) cultural journalism's perceived 'quality crisis' connected to transformations of thematic repertoires; and (3) the alleged decline of cultural expertise related to changes in cultural journalism's generic structures. The study makes a unique contribution to cultural journalism scholarship by identifying media-specific differences and complementary relationships between media forms, building on media ecology and genre theory. In contrast to the crisis discourse, results show that cultural journalism has expanded significantly through popularization and thematic and generic diversification, but the transformations are different in press, radio and television due to differing role positions in the larger media ecosystem. In addition, some parts of the cultural journalism media ecology appear to be endangered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the latest decade, the availability of news media from various countries of the globe has increased dramatically as both media production and consumption have been steered towards digital and social platforms. This de-territorialized news ecology has been widely researched in terms of content and distribution, while its broader consequences for news audiences have been less studied. Focusing on the case of Sweden, this article analyses social variations in transnational news consumption including platform selections, motivations, and attitudes connected to this news use. Results show that transnational news consumption is more widespread among people with a background in other countries than Sweden, but all together, more than a quarter of the Swedish population and nearly half of the younger generation are weekly consumers of news from other countries. Hence, transnational news consumption is no longer restricted to a specific elite-segment of society, which has been a common argument in scholarly debates around the globalization of news. Another central finding is that transnational news consumption is rooted in a willingness to understand the outside world through alternative perspectives, rather than in a dissatisfaction with the quality or trustworthiness of the news produced by Swedish outlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural journalism is a unique and underresearched subfield of journalism. This article presents the first systematic study of Swedish cultural journalism, quantitatively mapping content from four decades, zooming in on the years 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015. We study conceptions of the world outside Sweden during times marked by geopolitical turning points, globalization, and rapid structural transformations in the journalistic market. Employing content analysis of a representative sample from the press and public service radio, we explore geographical and scalar aspects, with a focus on political and global dimensions. Although we found evidence for Eurocentrism and domestication--staples of Western journalism overall--results show that Swedish cultural journalism was a steady conveyor of transnational narratives during all studied periods, which together with a primarily nonconflictual approach, sets cultural journalism apart from foreign news and decreases the risk of misframing in a globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of social media raises new questions concerning the relationship between journalists and politicians and between news media and politics. The increasingly complex media milieu, in which the boundaries between media producers and audiences become partly dissolved, calls for new theoretical approaches in the study of journalism. This article reassesses central theoretical arguments about the relationship between journalism, sources, politics and democracy. Drawing on a pilot study of the printed press, it explores the increased social media use among politicians in Sweden and its implications for political journalism. The article suggests that power relations between journalism and politics can be fruitfully explored from the perspective of mediatized interdependency, a perspective that acknowledges that journalists and politicians have become both actors and sources through mutual interaction in online spaces. Furthermore, it argues that social media use has expanded journalism's interest in the private life of politicians, thereby contributing to a de-politicization of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]