This article provides a comprehensive review of research on distrust towards news media and journalism, a topic that has gained significant attention in recent years due to declining institutional trust and the rise of political disinformation. We analyse existing literature focusing on how media distrust has been studied and conceptualised, its explanations, and its consequences. We highlight the conceptual diversity and methodological plurality in the field, noting the varied definitions and operationalisations of distrust, as well as the dominance of quantitative approaches alongside significant qualitative contributions. The complex relationship between distrust in the media and democracy is also explored, revealing conflicting evidence on whether distrust leads to news avoidance and reduced political engagement or fosters critical media consumption and political engagement. The review underscores the need for clearer definitions and typologies of distrust, supplementing dichotomous operationalisations of trust/distrust with ones that capture distrust as a multidimensional phenomenon, with each dimension having different antecedents and consequences.

This comprehensive collection introduces and contextualizes media studies’ most influential texts and thinkers, from early 20th century mass communication to the first stages of digital culture in the 21st century. The volume brings together influential theories about media, mediation and communication, as well as the relationships between media, culture and society. Each chapter presents a close reading of a classic text, written by a contemporary media studies scholar. Each contributor presents a summary of this text, relates it to the traditions of ideas in media studies and highlights its contemporary relevance. The text explores the core theoretical traditions of media studies: in particular, cultural studies, mass communication research, medium theory and critical theory, helping students gain a better understanding of how media studies has developed under shifting historical conditions and giving them the tools to analyse their contemporary situation. This is essential reading for students of media and communication and adjacent fields such as journalism studies, sociology and cultural studies.

Dallas Smythe’s article from 1977 is a milestone in the analysis of the political economy of the media. Here, Smythe argued that the role of communication had not been given sufficient attention within Marxist thought. Smythe formulated a materialist theory of communication, and put issues of class, capitalism, and commodification on the agenda. The article gave rise to key debate in the field of the political economy of the media and of how to understand the complex role(s) of communication within capitalism. Today, Smythe’s text has gained new significance in an era of commercial surveillance and digital commodification in the platform economy.

Previous research has concluded that the working-class is largely invisible on television. When the working-class is displayed; however, common frames highlight moral shortcomings and lack of responsibility. This study asks what difference such representations make. The study relies on cultivation analysis and a survey of the adult Swedish population to understand the extent to which heavy television viewers provide “television answers” in their descriptions of and attitudes toward the working-class. While some results are inconsistent, heavy television viewers seem more prone to view social inequalities as the result of working-class people's failure to take responsibility for their own well-being. 

One of the editors of this book was once a participant in a seminar with a famous French sociologist. The professor gave advice about projects and research ideas to the researchers and doctoral students that were participating. Then, someone asked the question of how best to understand one’s contemporaries and contemporary society. Perhaps the person asking the question had expected an answer about innovative research methods or about which social phenomena could say the most about the times we live in. But the sociologist had other advice. He said: stop following the noise of the news, turn off your feeds, and use the time you earn to re-read sociology’s classic texts. There was silence in the room. Would the way to understand the society of the 21st century go via texts written at the end of the 19th century, by people like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel?.

Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you or endangering what you have rightfully earned, whether by not giving it to you, by directly telling you to abstain from it or by intervening in social processes so that your enjoyment of what you have earned becomes impossible.

The media systems of the Nordic countries have for long been characterised by universality, freedom, trust, and cooperation between stakeholders. In comparative media systems research, the Nordic countries have been described as belonging to a single model – the Nordic media welfare state. The future of this model is now more uncertain than ever, as it is under increasing pressure from global tech companies, new digital media infrastructure, and developments in media policy, which all seem to elude domestic regulatory control. These developments raise questions about both the current state and the future of the media welfare state in a digital society – questions that this edited volume seeks to explore through conceptual, theoretical, and empirical analyses.

The first section of this edited volume analyses the current state of the media model in the Nordic countries and focuses on some of the challenges that the media welfare states are facing. The section provides a comparative analysis of how the media are used and how they are regulated. It also analyses specific challenges such as disinformation and hate speech and the current measures taken to tackle such issues. 

The second section of this volume addresses conceptual and theoretical issues regarding the concept of the Nordic media welfare state. Through both historical and contemporary case studies, the section extends the concept of media welfare by attending to digital infrastructures, libraries, environmental issues, as well as the integration of the media with other aspects of social welfare. In the final chapter of the book, the editors propose that the digital media welfare state can be expanded and adapted to the digital media landscape using the public service media companies as a platform to connect cultural institutions and citizens.

This book is of interest to students, researchers, and anyone seeking to understand developments in the media industries and media policy in the Nordic countries. The chapters in this volume are written by experts in their respective fields and provide the reader with both an overview and detailed knowledge about the Nordic media model. The editors – Peter Jakobsson and Johan Lindell at Uppsala University and Fredrik Stiernstedt at Södertörn University – have collaborated in several research projects that connect to the question of the future of the digital media welfare state.

In this article, we explore the history of Swedish newspaper carriers through the lens of the union struggles within the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union. This focus allows us to make visible the influence of a profession that has largely been overlooked in media history. Mobilizing around working conditions, the workers put pressure on the newspapers in terms of the size and weight of the papers with consequences for the editorial work. There was also a strong stance against commercial advertising and additional supplements that had consequences for the financial situation of newspapers. Hence, through their union struggles newspaper carriers directly influenced the outlook of newspapers in Sweden in the post-war era. In extension, we consider newspaper carriers as soft media infrastructures that had a crucial role and influence on the formation of the Swedish public.

Although it has been said for some decades that printed newspapers are dying, they are still in existence; however, Swedish newspapers have entered a new era. Throughout the country, the distribution of printed newspapers is slowly ceasing. In this article, we trace the process of the disappearance of printed news through ethnographic field work engaging with the perspectives of the newspaper industry, readers, and civil society. Conceptualizing the disappearance of printed news as an assemblage of imaginaries, materialities, and practices, we are interested in how this disappearance is accomplished, motivated, interpreted, and experienced. The article makes an argument for exploring disappearance in tandem with emergence to develop a deeper understanding of contemporary media culture and society.

Public service står inför utmaningar när politiska och ekonomiska förändringar omformar dess roll i Sverige och Europa. Med ett nytt betänkande från public service-kommittén 2024, som bevarar uppdraget men också inför nya begränsningar, ifrågasätts public services oberoende och trovärdighet. Samtidigt ökar den politiska kritiken från vissa partier, vilket kan påverka medieförtroendet och medielandskapet på lång sikt.