With the recent popular and academic concern over the rise of disinformation, fake news and the overall decay of the digital information environment, questions about citizens’ increasing distrust in the media have become urgent especially in liberal democracies. Whereas much of the earlier research attributed the erosion of trust in the news media to the rise of negative and cynical reporting and the growing frequency of media scandals, recent studies have sought to connect it to more general trends in western societies, including political polarisation and the growing dissatisfaction felt toward democratic institutions. A key observation arising from this more recent debate is that distrust in the professional news media often correlates with radical, marginal or “populist” political views. Distrust of the media connects to a more general distrust and repudiation of elites.
This paper seeks to contribute to the recent literature by addressing the question of journalistic impartiality and its complex relationship with audience perceptions of trust in the media in the current context of highly politicised knowledge environments. Neutrality or impartiality has been one of the key ideals and “strategic rituals” of professional journalism. However, it is precisely this purported neutrality, and the associated sense of inauthenticity and non-transparency, that may be driving growing segments of audiences away from mainstream journalism.
To scrutinise this hypothesis, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of popular perceptions of the news media’s trustworthiness in Finland. Among other Nordic countries, Finland is characterised by universal media and communications services as well as by high levels of media freedom and literacy. The media has traditionally enjoyed high levels of public trust and has been regarded as an inseparable part of the mechanism producing general trust in societal institutions. Nevertheless, as in many other liberal democracies, the political and media environments have changed dramatically in recent years with the demise of traditional parties, the rise of the nationalist right, political polarisation and social media scandals.
Empirically, the study builds on a 2019 survey concerning the perceptions of the media’s power and trustworthiness among a representative sample of the Finnish public (N=1053), as well as on three qualitative focus group discussions (also conducted in 2019) around the same topics, with 26 interviewees in total. The paper focuses on the expressions of distrust in the media and reasons of that distrust among survey respondents and focus group members. Survey findings indicate that public distrust in the professional news media is still at a relatively low level; nevertheless, there is a significant minority that expresses strong distrust of the media. The qualitative analysis suggests, among other things, that audience distrust is associated especially with the media’s perceived a lack of transparency. However, there are also indications that journalism is expected to be a neutral arbiter in an increasingly polarised and conflictual public sphere. The findings thus seem to only partly corroborate the hypothesis, calling for a nuanced reflection on the nature and practices of neutrality in professional journalism.