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Data de publicació electrònica: 29 de novembre de 2022 Data suggests that the majority of citizens in various countries came across ‘fake news’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. We test the relationship between perceived prevalence of misinformation and people’s worries about COVID-19. In Study 1, analyses of a survey across 17 countries indicate a positive association: perceptions of high prevalence of misinformation are correlated with high worries about COVID-19. However, the relationship is weaker in countries with higher levels of case-fatality ratios, and independent from the actual amount of misinformation per country. Study 2 replicates the relationship using experimental data. Furthermore, Study 2 demonstrates the underlying mechanism, that is, perceived prevalence of misinformation fosters the belief that COVID-19 is spiralling out of control, which in turn, increases worries. Our findings suggest that perceived prevalence of misinformation can have significant psychological effects, even though audience members reject the information as being false.

In contrast to beliefs in specific conspiracy theories, conspiratorial predispositions refer to people's propensity to view the world in conspiratorial terms. As such, they are one of the most important antecedents of beliefs in specific conspiracy theories. Understanding the antecedents of conspiratorial predispositions is hence important. Despite this, there is still only limited research on the antecedents of conspiratorial predispositions. Previous research has also not taken the role of media use into account, even though media constitute the most important source of politically and societally information. To remedy this, in the current study we use a large-scale panel study in Sweden to investigate the antecedents of conspiratorial predispositions, with a particular focus on the role of media use. Among other things, the results show that use of right-wing political alternative media is one of the most important antecedents of conspiratorial predispositions, even when accounting for ideological leaning and ideological extremity.

This chapter reviews how the transformation from low-choice to high-choice media environments has facilitated (a) the flow of mis- and disinformation and (b) politically motivated selective exposure and reasoning, and how this combination facilitates and increases knowledge resistance.

While ample research on audience trust in the news media uses survey questions that ask respondents about their trust in a generic “news media,” only scant research has investigated what types of news outlets respondents have in mind when answering such questions. These previous investigations originated mostly in the US and resulted in inconsistent findings. To further investigate this question, we use data from a large-scale survey (N = 2,337), collected in Sweden, including both general media trust measures and specific measures about trust in 20 mainstream and nonmainstream news outlets. The results demonstrate that our respondents seemingly averaged across all mainstream sources when they formed their general evaluations of the news media’s trustworthiness.

This chapter reviews current threats again public service broadcasting in Sweden, based on a literature review and analysis of the political debate. The major threats identified are an ambition from political parties to the right to decrease the resources of public service and limits its mission, an ambition from political parties to the right to increase the political control of public service, and a long-term campaign of politically motivated criticism – not supported by research – depicting public service as politically biased to the left.

While increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to news avoidance, there are only few studies taking the distinction between intentional and unintentional news avoidance into consideration, and none that has investigated the linkage between the two types of news avoidance and knowledge about politics and society. To fill this void, this study explores this relationship while distinguishing between knowledge related to uncontested issues and knowledge related to issues that have been subject to public controversies (climate change, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, crime, and immigration). Relying on a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens conducted in 2020 ( N = 2,160), we find that the relationship with patterns of news use is substantially different across these types of beliefs. Among other things, the results suggest that knowledge of uncontested issue domains is positively related to news use, but knowledge of contested issue domains is not. The intentional avoidance of news is only negatively related to knowledge of contested issues. Taken together, the results suggest that the mechanisms driving beliefs related to uncontested versus contested issues are substantially different.

There are three overarching threats to public broad- casting in Sweden. As this report will show, one is the threat to the capacity of public broadcast- ing institutions to fulfil their mission, the secondis the threat to the independence of public broadcasting institutions themselves, and the third is the long-term campaign to portray the public broadcasting as left-wing and biased, thereby undermine trust in public broadcasting. In order to understand these threats, it is important to first paint a picture of what the mission of public broadcasting in Sweden is.

Whether political communication research is media-centric or politics-centric is an interesting question. In this article, I argue however that it is important is to clarify whether the answer depe...

Against the background of claims that Sweden is a country in steep decline or on the verge of collapsing or experiencing a system collapse, this report examines how Sweden is ranked in altogether 49 internationally comparative indices and rankings.

How citizens’ perceptions of societal problems are shaped by media use has been a critical question in media effects research for decades. This study addresses a specific puzzle concerning media effects in contemporary fragmented media environments: the dual role of media trust as both (a) an antecedent variable guiding news selection and (b) a moderator variable conditioning the effects of news use on perceptions of societal problems. Building upon the differential susceptibility to media effects model, we analyze the role of media trust for citizens’ orientation towards mainstream and alternative news media—and how such usage influences perceptions of two major societal issues: health care and school. Findings from a four-wave panel survey conducted in Sweden suggest that public service and alternative news use matter for citizens’ perceptions of societal problems and that media trust influences news choices and may, partly, condition media effects.

This chapter investigates the antecedents and correlates of conspiratorial predispositions, using the annual Swedish SOM-survey. Among other things, the results show that there is a correlation between stronger conspiratorial predispositions on the one hand, and education, social trust, and media use on the other.

In this report, it is compared how Sweden is ranked in 49 international indices and rankings that have been published during the last five years. The results show that Sweden generally is ranked as one of the leading countries.

The policy of free movement—one of the core principles of the European Union—has become increasingly politicized. This makes it more important to understand how attitudes toward free movement are shaped, and the role of the media. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate how news frames affect attitudes toward free movement, and whether education moderates framing effects. The findings from a survey experiment conducted in seven European countries show that the effects are few and inconsistent across countries. This suggest that these attitudes are not easily shifted by exposure to a single news frame.

A key problem with research on news media trust is that it has mostly focused on general media trust and that there is limited research on how media trust might vary across levels of analysis. In this paper, we seek to remedy this by investigating whether news media trust differs depending on the topic of news coverage and whether topical trust can be distinguished from general media trust. We also investigate the antecedents of trust in news coverage of different topics and the effects of topical trust on issue (mis)perceptions. Among other things, findings show that topical media trust can be distinguished from general media trust and is a better predictor of correct perceptions on political matters.

The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individuals in 17 European countries. Our aim is to (i) profile different types of news consumers and (ii) understand how each user profile is linked to political knowledge acquisition. Our results show that five user profiles – news minimalists, social media news users, traditionalists, online news seekers, and hyper news consumers – can be identified, although the prevalence of these profiles varies across countries. Findings further show that both traditional and online-based news diets are correlated with higher political knowledge. However, online-based news use is more widespread in Southern Europe, where it is associated with lower levels of political knowledge than in Northern Europe. By focusing on news audiences, this study provides a comprehensive and fine-grained analysis of how contemporary European political information environments perform and contribute to an informed citizenry.

Scholars have raised concerns that on many issues, citizens are reluctant to trust factual evidence and statistics. One factor that has been shown to impact the perceived truth in statistics is how they are presented, where negatively framed statistics are perceived as truer than positive. This study explores when this bias applies and not. Results from a survey experiment confirm the presence of a negativity bias in truth perceptions, but also that effects are heterogeneous and moderated by, in particular, the recipients’ preexisting opinions. These findings provide valuable information to public actors responsible for disseminating factual information to diverse publics.

While the role of social media in the spread of conspiracy theories has received much attention, a key deficit in previous research is the lack of distinction between different types of platforms. This study places the role of social media affordances in facilitating the spread of conspiracy beliefs at the center of its enquiry. We examine the relationship between platform use and conspiracy theory beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on the concept of technological affordances, we theorize that variation across key features make some platforms more fertile places for conspiracy beliefs than others. Using data from a crossnational dataset based on a two-wave online survey conducted in 17 countries before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that Twitter has a negative effect on conspiracy beliefs—as opposed to all other platforms under examination which are found to have a positive effect.

One key trend changing political environments across advanced industrial democracies is increasing electoral volatility. Despite extensive research, at the individual level we still know relatively little about the mechanisms behind electoral volatility during election campaigns, including the impact of political knowledge. Against this background and based on a four-wave panel study in the context of the 2014 Swedish national election, the purpose of this paper is to investigate (a) patterns of intra-election volatility and the impact of (b) political knowledge on patterns of electoral volatility. Distinguishing between party alienation, crystallization, wavering, reinforcement, and conversion, among other things, findings show some effects from political knowledge on patterns of electoral volatility but only for acquired political knowledge.

In contemporary high-choice media environments, the issue of media trust and its impact on people's media use has taken on new importance. At the same time, the extent to which people trust the news media and how much it matters for their use of different types of media is not clear. To lay the groundwork for future research, in this article we offer a focused review of (a) how news media trust has been conceptualized and operationalized in previous research and (b) research on the extent to which news media trust influences media use, and (c) offer a theoretically derived framework for future research on news media trust and its influence on media use.

In his famous book, Social science concepts: A systematic analysis (1984), Giovanni Sartori (1984) is hard on his fellow scholars in the social sciences. Bemoaning a lack of conceptual clarity and a widespread collective ambiguity of social science concepts, he diagnoses a “state of chaos” in most social science disciplines and calls for concept reconstruction as “a highly needed therapy” (pp. 41-42). Although Sartori did not explicitly refer to populism in the context of these remarks, it seems fair to say that they apply to this concept. Populism surely ranks among the most popular and, at the same time, most contested concepts in the social sciences. Numerous articles and chapters have been written about how populism should best be dened and which elements “really” constitute populism. However, there is still no consensus about what the term should describe. Of course, it can be argued that it is usual for social science concepts to be contested and that alternative conceptualizations and denitions provide scholars with the opportunity to select the specic version of a concept that suits them and their research interests best. Nonetheless, problems like collective conceptual ambiguity, lack of precision, and the widespread use of different terms for describing the same phenomena (synonymy) or of the same term for describing different phenomena (homonymy) can have negative consequences. Most importantly, such inconsistencies hamper scientic discourse and communication between science and society. Further, they endanger the comparability of ndings and, as a consequence, impede the accumulation and integration of research results, theory building, and the thorough explanation of the social phenomena at hand.

Although populist communication has become pervasive throughout Europe, many important questions on its political consequences remain unanswered. First, previous research has neglected the differential effects of populist communication on the Left and Right. Second, internationally comparative studies are missing. Finally, previous research mostly studied attitudinal outcomes, neglecting behavioral effects. To address these key issues, this paper draws on a unique, extensive, and comparative experiment in sixteen European countries (N = 15,412) to test the effects of populist communication on political engagement. The findings show that anti-elitist populism has the strongest mobilizing effects, and anti-immigrant messages have the strongest demobilizing effects. Moreover, national conditions such as the level of unemployment and the electoral success of the populist Left and Right condition the impact of populist communication. These findings provide important insights into the persuasiveness of populist messages spread throughout the European continent. © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

The growth of partisan news sources has raised concerns that people will increasingly select attitude-consistent information, which lead to increasing political polarization. Thus far, there is limited research on the long-term mutual influences between selective exposure and political attitudes. This study therefore investigates the reciprocal influences between selective exposure and political attitudes over several years, using a three-wave panel survey conducted in Sweden 2014–2016. More specifically, we analyse how ideological selective exposure to both traditional and online news media influences citizens’ ideological leaning. Findings suggest that (1) people seek-out ideologically consistent print news and online news, and (2) such attitude-consistent news exposure reinforces citizens’ ideological leaning over time. In practice, however, such reinforcement effects are hampered by (3) relatively low overall ideological selective exposure and a (4) significant degree of cross-cutting news exposure online. These findings are discussed in light of selective exposure theory and reinforcing spirals model. PLEASE NOTE: The final version of this paper was published as: – Dahlgren, Peter M., Shehata, Adam & Strömbäck, Jesper (2019). Reinforcing Spirals at Work? Mutual Influences between Selective News Exposure and Ideological Leaning. European Journal of Communication, online early.

During the last decade, the concept of a mediatization of politics has become increasingly popular. A search in Google Scholar, for example, reveals that there were about 2000 citations in the year...

During the last decennia media environments and political communication systems have changed fundamentally. These changes have major ramifications for the political information environments and the extent to which they aid people in becoming informed citizens. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to review research on key changes and trends in political information environments and assess their democratic implications. We will focus on advanced postindustrial democracies and six concerns that are all closely linked to the dissemination and acquisition of political knowledge: (1) declining supply of political information, (2) declining quality of news, (3) increasing media concentration and declining diversity of news, (4) increasing fragmentation and polarization, (5) increasing relativism and (6) increasing inequality in political knowledge. © Taylor & Francis 2017

The transition from low-choice to high-choice media environments has raised new concerns about selective exposure. In this context, two types of selective media exposure are relevant. One is selectivity based on political ideological preferences, the other selectivity based on political interest. Evidence for both has been found primarily in an American context, while there is less research on European countries. This is problematic, as the opportunity structures for different forms of selectivity vary across media environments. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate the two types of selective exposure in a country—Sweden—where the opportunity structures for selective exposure differ from the American context. This study investigates both types of selective exposure in relation to televised party-leader interviews. Based on panel survey data, the findings show that selective exposure based on political interest is substantially more important than selective exposure based on ideological preferences in explaining exposure to party-leader interviews. To substantiate this finding, the results are replicated with partisan learning as the dependent variable.

This study examines the supply of political information programming across thirteen European broadcast systems over three decades. The cross-national and cross-temporal design traces the composition and development of political information environments with regard to the amount and placement of news and current affairs programs on the largest public and private television channels. It finds that the televisual information environments of Israel and Norway offer the most advantageous opportunity structure for informed citizenship because of their high levels of airtime and a diverse scheduling strategy. The study contributes to political communication research by establishing "political information environments" as a theoretically and empirically grounded concept that informs and supplements the comparison of "media systems." If developed further, it could provide an information-rich, easy-to-measure macro-unit for future comparative research. Ciencias de la Comunicación II

This study is an investigation of how members of the Norwegian and the Swedish parliaments relate to and perceive their relationships with the media. Based on surveys conducted among members of the Norwegian Storting and the Swedish Riksdag, we find that male MPs have more frequent and somewhat less formal relationships with media and journalists compared with female MPs. The results also suggest that male MPs have adapted to the media and their logic more than female MPs. Female MPs also appear to be more critical towards the requirements imposed on politicians who want to get media exposure, compared with male MPs. Analysis reveals that gender differences are smaller among Swedish than Norwegian MPs.

The purpose of this study was to compare the predictive power of overall political news consumption and media-specific news consumption, on perceived issue salience across different media channels and media types in the context of the 2006 Swedish parliamentary election. Findings suggest that overall consumption of political news is significantly more important than consumption of specific media outlets in predicting changes in issue salience. Although the study demonstrates that the Swedish news media collectively can exert considerable agenda-setting influence over their audiences, it could, however, not find any consistent evidence of differences related to media channels or media types. The reasons for and implications of the results are discussed.

This study investigates the linkages between presidential public relations activities—speeches and press conferences—and public opinion towards the presidency from 1961 to 1997. The results show that there is a positive linkage between presidential news conferences and foreign policy job approval, and between presidential speeches and general as well as foreign policy job approval. Overall, the findings reveal stronger linkages between presidential news conferences and job approval than between presidential speeches and job approval, but also that the topic of the information subsidies and the specific type of job approval matters.

While the histories of opinion polling and the news media have been closely intertwined ever since the invention of polling, the question as to whether the media's reporting on opinion polls should be considered as detrimental or beneficial from a democratic perspective is still open and contested. The purpose of this paper is thus to investigate the publication of opinion polls in the Swedish media during the last three election campaigns, with a focus on how the media used opinion polls and whether or not the media, at the end of the day, mainly used opinion polls to give voice to the people - or to the media and the journalists themselves. Among other things, the results suggest that more often than not, polls serve as vox media rather than vox populi. Zgodovini mnenjskih poizvedb in medijev se tesno prepletata vse od začetkov poizvedb, vendar na vprašanje, ali je medijsko poročanje o poizvedbah koristno ali škodljivo za demokracijo, še ni jasnega odgovora. Članek obravnava objavo mnenjskih poizvedb v švedskih medijih v času zadnjih treh volilnih kampanj s poudarkom na načinu uporabe poizvedb in na vprašanju, ali so mediji uporabljali mnenjske poizvedbe predvsem za to, da so dali glas ljudstvu ali samim sebi. Rezultati analize med drugim kažejo, da so mnenjske poizvedbe pogosteje vox media kot vox populi.

Although there is plenty of research investigating the linkages between news media use and political distrust, virtually all of these studies focus on the impact of media use on political distrust at a particular point in time. At the same time, the transition from low-choice to high-choice media environments suggests that the relationship might not be stable across time. Whatever the linkages between news media use and political distrust were in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s, it cannot a priori be assumed that those linkages are the same or of equal strength today. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the changing relationship between news media use and political trust across time. Among other things, the results show that there is a positive linkage between news media use and political trust but also that for some media, this relationship weakens across time.

During the last few decades, the world has witnessed a dual democratic transformation. On the one hand and beginning with the fall of communism, the number of electoral democracies worldwide almost doubled between 1989 and 2011 (Freedom House, 2012). The victory of democracy and capitalism may not have marked the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992), but today there is no alternative political system that enjoys the same worldwide support and legitimacy as democracy (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Inglehart, 2003). On the other hand, many established democracies have witnessed a transformation towards increasing complexity, less deferential and increasingly critical and dissatisfied citizens (Norris, 2011), lower electoral turnout and trust in politicians and political institutions (Franklin, 2004; Norris, 1999), and increasingly autonomous, market-driven and critical media (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Hamilton, 2004; Patterson, 1993). National political institutions and actors thus find themselves under increasing pressure from both citizens and the media, while the need to find solutions to major challenges such as global warming, rising inequalities, weak growth and increasing deficits appears both more urgent and more difficult to tackle.

In most democracies and for most people, television constitutes the most important source of political and current affairs information. How televi- sion news covers election campaigns may thus have significant influence on how voters perceive and evaluate the candidates, parties, and issues at stake. At the same time, critics claim that media commercialization in terms of increased market-orientation has changed the style and character of elec- tion news, from descriptive to increasingly interpretive journalism, and from framing politics as issues to increasingly framing politics as a strategic game and as scandals. Notwithstanding such claims, there is a lack of longi- tudinal studies investigating television election news coverage and, overall, empirical evidence for possible effects of media commercialization on elec- tion news is rather scarce. Against this background, the objective of this chapter is to study changes in television news journalism in Sweden across the four election campaigns 1998–2010 and to discuss whether any changes can be related to media commercialization.

When we want to learn about the world around us, there are basically three perceptual sources of information: personal experiences, interpersonal communication and the media (Asp, 1986). We can learn things firsthand, by communicating with other people, or by taking part of different media.

As stated in the Introduction, the twofold purpose of this book is first to bring together state-of-the-art chapters on the mediatization of politics, thereby assessing what we know and providing a framework for further research; and second to move research on the mediatization of politics forward towards a more fully developed theory. For this reason, we invited leading scholars in this field to comment in their chapters on basic and more advanced questions and to develop various topics and perspectives. The scope in content and the depth of analysis of their contributions underscore the many different ways in which mediatization research can augment the literature of political communication and how stimulating the impulses are that it evokes.

The relationship between journalists and their sources has been described as an interdependent relationship where each part needs the other. For political actors, this relationship is particularly important during election campaigns, when their need to reach voters through the media is even more urgent than usual. This is particularly true with respect to European Parliamentary election campaigns, as these are often less salient and as people's need for orientation is greater than in national elections. However, there is only limited cross-national research on the media's use of news sources and whether there are associations between the use of news sources and media framing. This holds true for research on election campaigns in general and on European Parliamentary election campaigns in particular. Against this background, this study investigates cross-national differences and similarities in the media's use of news sources in their coverage of the 2009 European Parliamentary election campaigns and the extent to which the use of news sources is associated with the media's framing of politics and the EU. The study draws upon a quantitative content analysis of the media coverage in twelve countries. Findings suggest that there are both important similarities and differences across countries with respect to the use of news sources and that there are cases when the use of news sources is related to the framing of politics and the EU. Ciencias de la Comunicación II

Mission Impossible? : Some Notes on Journalistic Shortcomings in the Coverage of War and Terrorism