Can journalism regain its credibility? – Yes, but the fault does not lie with the media, it is the politicians who need to stop lying.

Declining newspaper and advertising sales have been a long-standing problem for news media. The political landscape has also affected how people view the media’s credibility. Straight-up lies, no problem. Smearing opponents without grounds, happens on a daily basis. This game generates volumes of content that journalism needs to manage and respond to. Which in turn means that the real journalistic work ends up in the wake of all these lies.

With two major political events coming up in 2024, journalism needs to regain its credibility and be the sturdy vessel in a stormy sea. But does it even stand a chance of reclaiming it?

– Yes, Michael Karlsson says without hesitation. But there are three major challenges that journalism needs to prepare for. First of all, resource cuts have made it more challenging to produce the same amount of high-quality journalistic output as before. Another problem is that journalism has become a bat in the political debate where representatives from different sides, perhaps more from one side, in different ways accuse journalists of not doing a professional job. The third challenge is that it is very difficult for journalism to dispute this accusation since it has gained ground as a truth among the voters of the political representatives. Journalism is, in other words, not perceived as credible despite doing things in the same way as before.

Henrik Örnebring follows along the same line and says that there are many factors involved in creating this situation. And most of them are outside the control of journalism.

– To put it bluntly, it is mainly right-wing parties that have made criticising journalism their concern – there is research to support this. So, does journalism have to become more extreme right to silence these critical voices? No, of course they cannot do that. At the same time, there are a many other things that have impacted the situation, such fragmentation of the audience – journalism cannot do anything about the depopulation of the countryside, for example.

Are the problems the same at the global level?

– Yes, says Henrik Örnebring. But the situation here in the Nordic countries is better than other parts of the world. A distinction is usually made between political polarisation, where people move away from the centre and vote more for the extremes, and affective polarisation, where people express stronger dislike for their opponents. It has almost become a truth that Sweden is very polarised, but if you look at studies, the polarisation is not particularly strong – on the other hand, there are many people who say that Sweden is polarised. This might make you wonder why they say that and what they are trying to achieve? If you keep repeating it, it contributes to polarisation. Sweden is still in a fairly good place – people have a fair amount of trust in journalism. People have a fair amount trust in politicians. People have a fair amount trust in various institutions. Of course, credibility has challenges, but it is not under any major threat. On the other hand, there is a public opinion where certain interests want it to appear as if there is a complete system collapse going on. But there isn’t – especially compared to the USA or India, which are much more polarised than Sweden.

AI continues to take giant leaps forward. How big is the threat from AI when it comes to the credibility of journalism?

– I don’t think that AI in itself is a particularly big threat to the credibility of journalism, says Michael Karlsson. A bigger problem with AI is that journalism is drowning in a lot of other things that appeal to what people want to read. Journalism is trying to find a sort of neutral middle ground and it is difficult to make your voice heard in this enormous digital flow of information. Various political forces can very easily produce large amounts of AI-generated garbage that has not happened in reality. And journalism often has to respond to that, which means that it takes time and resources away from actual journalistic work.

–Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon said “Flood the zone with shit” where the strategy was to say a lot of things that are false and then spread it everywhere, Henrik Örnebring explains. But the journalists needed to respond to it and always had to be on the defensive. AI makes it a great deal easier and more efficient to spread lots of rubbish in a short time.

So, how should the audience, for example first-time voters, think in relation to election campaigns?

– First-time voters are not the problem, says Henrik Örnebring. There are several studies showing that older people share misinformation to a greater extent than young people. It is us adults who need help distinguishing what is true or not. Young people handle this much better.

So, who can you trust?

– In general, you can trust the major media outlets, says Henrik Örnebring. SVT, SR, DN and the major local newspapers - they all have a system in place for quality control. Some things might slip through the cracks, but if the sender is mainstream media, there has usually been a quality and source check to verify the content. It is more likely to be true if DN shares the information than if it comes from an older man.

– I would also say that you can trust the traditional institutions, says Michael Karlsson. If you have read or heard something that sounds crazy, go to a source that has a system of responsibility in place. You can, of course, criticise what journalists write, but there are accountability requirements that they need to adhere to in both the short and the long term. This is not the case on TikTok.

What can we as a media consumers expect from journalism during an election period?

– The EU election is a “low engagement election” where fewer people vote compared to other elections and they’re not as interested, says Henrik Örnebring. The media coverage will be better and more all-covering than you might expect considering the interest is fairly low. But the media likes elections and will do a good job reporting on what the different parties want to achieve and where they fit into the European context.

And if we look at the presidential election in the US

– Historically, research in political journalism shows that it is an extremely steep curve leading up to the election and then it drops, says Michael Karlsson. We also know that there has been a shift from “case coverage” to “horse racing reporting” – in other words, who is leading in the opinion polls. We also know that there are a lot more analyses and interpretations, or speculations if you want to be a bit mean, in other words, things that do not help the recipients to understand what the actual policies stand for.

Are there any ground rules at all?

– Yes, there are rules, says Michael Karlsson. But you have to make a distinction between news journalism and commentary programmes that look like a news programme. Real news journalism is regulated just as it always has been in an editorial news space.

But isn’t it hard for viewers to tell the difference?

– One hundred percent difficult, says Henrik Örnebring.

– If you have a person speculating and using graphics like a news broadcast, it makes it very difficult for the recipient to determine if it is journalism or not, says Michael Karlsson. The recipient might have listened to someone else thirty seconds ago where everything looked exactly the same.

– As for the US, it can be said that during the last presidential election, there were many researchers and commentators who believed that this is actually part of the problem, Henrik Örnebring explains. In the US, there is a much stronger standard of balance than in Sweden, and there must always be room for voices from both sides. It took a very long time during the last presidential election before the American mainstream media even wanted to say that Donald Trump was telling lies. They didn’t want to use the word lie because it was so highly charged. But that’s what he did, and it was the job of journalism to report on what was going on. But if one of the candidates lies a million times a day and the other barely lies at all – what do you do?

– You get what the American journalism researcher Jay Rosen refers to as false symmetry. He talks about asymmetry – this rule that you always have to have balance, it doesn’t work if it turns out that one side is lying a lot more than the other. You could say that the rules of the game have been hacked by one side. And the way it’s looking at the moment, American journalists haven’t learned a thing. They still give Trump a lot of free press, writing that he claims things instead of writing that he is telling lies. They are somewhat better at checking facts, but this is usually added separately. In the article, you would write something neutral and then put a fact-check in another part of the newspaper, adding that he lied.

Is that because they’re afraid of reprisals?

– Many journalists are probably already concerned about their physical safety, says Henrik Örnebring.

– Many are probably also concerned about not being able to do what they have done throughout their professional life, says Michael Karlsson. You’ve been working in journalism and it has worked and it’s very difficult to break routines.

So, how can you regain the trust of an audience that strongly questions the product?

– Much of this is not the fault of journalism, says Michael Karlsson. Through research, we know that people are very sensitive to journalism doing something wrong. Which basically means that journalism cannot make mistakes. So the way to build trust is to deliver good output all the time. Without even the smallest of errors. That is one way of building trust. If you fundamentally don’t trust the person in front of you, you won’t trust anything that person does – regardless of how they do it. So, this is very difficult and a big challenge.

To summarise, how did we end up here?

– What could the media have done? Henrik Örnebring asks. The fault does not lie with the media, it is the politicians who need to stop lying. Politicians must stop mobilising voters by saying the media is lying.

– The media cannot survive without cooperating with other institutions in society, so the question is what other institutions can do to make it easier for the media to do their job. Well, the answer is that politicians should stop smearing the media and giving interviews, companies should advertise in the media and citizens should pay for and take part of the content.