Public service media (PSM) across Europe face ongoing challenges related to declining audience use, particularly among younger generations, who increasingly turn to social media platforms and commercial media. These developments have often been interpreted as signalling a crisis of legitimacy of PSM and their public value. This paper explores such assumptions by examining how young people themselves understand, experience, and articulate the value of PSM. The paper draws upon an exploratory comparative study of focus group discussions conducted with young adults in Sweden and Estonia. The findings show that while participants in both countries rarely use PSM as part of their routine media consumption, they nonetheless attribute significant societal relevance and value to these media. They consistently associate PSM with decommodification, trustworthiness, education, inclusion, accessibility, and national continuity, often defining these values explicitly in contrast to commercial and social media platforms. They were also associated with childhood memories and family rituals. Although these themes were common across the two national contexts, there were differences pertaining to their history and sociopolitical context. We conclude that limited use of PSM among young people does not necessarily signal a lack of recognition of their public value. © The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Investigates how political reporting can more effectively counter misinformation in order to enhance the public legitimacy of journalism • Informed by one of the largest studies to date on fact-checking and misinformation reporting • Includes original interviews with senior journalists and editors, analysis of online and broadcast news, and online diaries, surveys and focus groups with news audiences • Explores misinformation from an international perspective, with a particular focus on the UK and the US • Draws on comparisons with a range of national contexts – including non-Western countries - to explore debates and issues surrounding misinformation • Goes beyond studies that focus exclusively on disinformation solely emanating from social media and identifies where misinformation can spread through mainstream media This book examines how journalists should deal with the growing tide of political disinformation and public scepticism towards news media. Informed by the latest research from the UK and around the world, the book draws on a series of UK-based studies over a six-year period between 2019-2024, systematically analysing over 4000 news items and sources across fact-checking sites and broadcast programming. It examines audiences through a survey of more than 1,000 people, a news diary study of 200 participants, and fourteen focus groups, in addition to interviewing some of the most prominent news editors and journalists in broadcast news. The authors look beyond disinformation emanating from online and social media platforms to identify where and how misinformation can spread across mainstream media. To enhance the legitimacy of journalism and better serve the public, they argue that news reporting should more regularly and robustly confront false and misleading information from politicians.

Media stereotypes have been a persistent concern in media and communication studies, especially in the context of mediated images of cultural and national others. This paper discusses Gumpert and Cathart’s seminal 1983 contribution on the topic. Influenced by the field of social psychology, the authors emphasised the embeddedness of media stereotypes in social interaction and interpersonal communication. They also highlighted how the media perpetuate stereotypes by emphasising cultural differences. Evaluating Gumpert and Cathart’s analytical framework more than forty years later, this paper argues that little has changed in terms of media stereotypes, despite advances in technology and diversity in representations.

This article explores whether different media platforms across impartial news media supplied the same level of scrutiny in how they fact-checked political claims. While prior research has largely focused on independent fact-checking organisations, the fact-checking practices of legacy media through a cross-platform perspective have comparatively received limited attention. The study develops new lines of inquiry into the fact-checking practices of legacy media, presenting one of the largest and most forensic cross-platform studies of fact-checking to date. It draws on a systematic content analysis of 355 items from fact-checking sites, including 689 claims and 1850 instances where journalists or sources interacted with them in 2021, and assesses how they were covered by a further 280 television news items. Our findings demonstrate that the selection and degree to which journalists and sources scrutinised political claims varied across media platforms, with television news less inclined to report and analyse policy claims than dedicated fact-checking websites. Overall, we argue that the editorial boundaries of fact-checking are policed by journalists' interpretations of impartiality, which differ across platforms (in television news or dedicated fact-checking websites) due to a range of editorial factors such as production constraints and news values.

What are audiences supposed to feel in relation to the reporting of global crises? How are they supposed to act in response to it? These are the ethical questions posed by the media coverage of crises addressed in this chapter. These questions are underlined by two normative assumptions. The first has to do with the assumption that cosmopolitan empathy is the outcome of news of disasters. The second has to do with the expectation of a global public that will act to alleviate the suffering witnessed. The chapter argues that these assumptions are interlinked but not necessarily overlapping. After considering the ethical questions posed by the reporting of contemporary global crises, the chapter reflects on future directions of research on the audiences of cross-border journalism.

This chapter unpacks the ethical questions and dilemmas that have preoccupied the field of humanitarian communication over time. It draws upon the concept of media witnessing, which describes the distinct character of practices pertaining to the mediation of suffering and invites us to think of audiences’ engagement with suffering on different media platforms, the testimonies of suffering victims, and the practices of reporting on suffering. The chapter looks at the ethical questions raised at these three different stages of mediation, exploring the politics of representation, mediated compassion and action at-a-distance, and the ethics of humanitarian reporting and NGOs. The aim is not to answer these questions but to illustrate how addressing them has been a complex and open-ended negotiation intertwined with changes in media practices and technologies.

This study examines the portrayal of Syrians on Turkish Twitter between January and August 2021 through a big data analysis of more than 30,000 tweets. We employ the concept of online toxicity to differentiate between disinformation and hate speech and explore how they are embedded in the negative debates about Syrians on Twitter. Through opinion analysis, the study recognizes disinformation and hate speech patterns within tweets and questions the role they play in boosting anti-Syrian narratives, as well as the main actors behind them in the Turkish Twittersphere. The findings indicate that the discourse about Syrians on Twitter was overwhelmingly negative, with both disinformation and hate speech playing a significant role. Furthermore, a considerable portion of the disinformation tweets could be traced back to opposition political actors, highlighting how negative sentiment on Twitter was not only expressive of generalized public resentment against Syrians but also instrumentalized for political purposes. Overall, this article demonstrates how Twitter contributes to the public debate about Syrians in Turkey, reproducing nationalist narratives and serving political agendas. 

The content and effects of disinformation have become a focal point in communication studies over recent years. But how media audiences themselves interpret the meaning of disinformation and mitigate the risks it poses to their understanding of the world have remained largely understudied. This article draws upon a UK-based focus group study that examines how people conceptualise disinformation, and the ways this informs their engagement with news media. Our findings revealed that common definitions of disinformation go beyond 'fake news' and conspiracy theories to include an array of phenomena, such as biased news, political spin and misrepresented information. Far from simply not trusting information sources or being passive recipients of disinformation, we argue that audiences have developed a pragmatic scepticism in their relationship with media across different platforms, which reflects a critical reading of news media both as texts and institutions.

Balance and impartiality are central principles in journalism, but this study argues their conceptual application in news reporting should be subject to more academic scrutiny. In the UK, the way “due impartiality” has been applied and regulated by broadcasters has raised concerns about promoting a ‘she-said-he-said’ style of reporting, which constructs balance but not scrutiny of competing claims. In this study, we analyse how the UK’s “due impartiality” was applied by journalists in different political contexts by assessing how the BBC dealt with competing party-political claims. We develop a nuanced quantitative analysis of BBC journalist interactions (N = 967) with claims made by the four main party leaders during the 2019 UK and 2020 US elections. Overall, we found BBC reporting robustly challenged claims by US politicians, whereas coverage of UK politicians often only conveyed claims and counterclaims with limited journalistic intervention, particularly on television news. We argue that impartiality should be viewed more as a fluid than fixed concept given that the context shapes how it is applied. As concerns about misinformation have grown over recent years, we conclude that more finely tuned studies are needed to understand how journalists apply concepts about balance and impartiality in political reporting.

Fact-checking has been identified as a significant journalistic tool in the fight against disinformation. Relevant studies have focused on its emergence as a movement within journalism aiming at renewing the profession, as well as its effectiveness in challenging disinformation, especially during elections. However, little has been said about how audiences themselves understand fact-checking and employ it in their daily consumption of news. In this article, we answer these questions by drawing upon two sets of data. The first consists of fourteen focus group discussions in the UK, which included 52 participants, and were conducted online between April and May 2021. The second consists of two qualitative surveys that explored news consumers’ understandings of fact-checking and their evaluations of current fact-checking practices of UK media during the same period. We conclude that the use of fact-checking remains largely peripheral, and its influence is minimal in people’s news consumption. However, there is an appetite for more fact-checking in television news, as a way of holding politicians into account and helping the public better understand politics. In this context, we argue, if fact-checking is to play an important role in political discourse, it should become a regular part of broadcast journalism.