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Formålet med dette projekt er at undersøge, hvordan nye oplysninger om økonomi i medierne påvirker borgernes økonomiske evaluering, opfattelse og viden.

Hvad folk ser og læser i medierne, bestemmes ikke længere kun af journalister, men i stigende grad af algoritmer. Disse algoritmer vælger, sorterer og prioriterer vores information. Automatiserede processer, som fx YouTubes anbefalingsalgoritme, påvirker den måde, vi ser verden på. Et vigtigt demokratisk spørgsmål er derfor, om YouTubes anbefalingsalgoritme eksponerer publikum incidentalt for politisk information, efter at man har set underholdningsindhold, og om algoritmen skaber en filterboble ved primært at anbefale indhold med et lignende politisk perspektiv. Under det danske folketingsvalg i 2019 var anbefalingsalgoritmen mere tilbøjelig til at føre seere væk fra end hen imod nyheder med politisk indhold. Når folk havde set en video, der var uploadet af de politiske partier Venstre eller Stram Kurs, blev de af algoritmen primært anbefalet videoer fra de samme partier, hvilket kan medføre, at de bliver bekræftede i forudindtagne holdninger (bekræftelsesbias). For andre partier var dette mindre tilfældet. Kun i begrænset omfang fører anbefalingsalgoritmen seere fra mainstream til ekstremt højreorienteret indhold.

The relation between journalists and politicians in liberal democracies is traditionally conceptualized as highly institutionalized, based on mutual dependence, and grounded in a shared culture of jointly respected role relations. While this conceptualization provides a fruitful framework to understand the relation between mainstream journalists and politicians, it falls short in explaining the way outsider politicians such as Beppe Grillo, Donald Trump, Thierry Baudet, or Nigel Farage address the mainstream media. Thus, this article rethinks the relation between journalists and politicians in the light of the Western political-media environment in the 2010s, where the rise of authoritarian populism, the fragmentation of media audiences, and the fading boundaries around the journalistic profession have substantially changed media–politics relations. This article aims to make a theoretical contribution by conceptualizing the relation between outsider politicians and mainstream journalists as an ongoing negotiation over legitimacy. Central in this conceptualization is a classification of five strategies which outsider politicians use to delegitimize mainstream journalists: attacking their character, connecting them with other institutions which are seen as illegitimate, attacking their ethical standards, challenging the claim that journalists work in the public interest, and questioning the beneficial consequences of their work. The consequences of these delegitimation strategies are discussed.

The current socio-economic climate is marked by an increased focus on corporate responsibility and the role of business in society. In this climate, megamarketing – efforts to develop and sustain an industry or market by gaining the cooperation and support of various stakeholders and publics – is an increasingly relevant approach. Current research in megamarketing focuses on understanding how various industry actors and stakeholders establish the legitimacy of a given industry by accommodating prevailing regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive structures. In contrast, this paper examines megamarketing efforts that go beyond such attempts to establish legitimacy towards establishing an industry as a virtuous entity displaying qualities that surpass minimal accepted standards and ‘business-as-usual.’ Inspired by work on virtue ethics in organisational studies, we develop the concept of industry aura: a ‘halo’ of unique and authentic virtues that characterise an industry. We explore the development of industry aura by surveying the discursive megamarketing tactics through which microfinance has been established as a virtuous industry. We conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses of 589 articles about microfinance appearing in five selected newspapers between 1986 and 2016. Our findings reveal three sets of megamarketing discursive tactics: 1) diagnostic framing and social mission framing, deployed to establish microfinance as a virtuous entity; 2) virtue anchoring and frame bridging, used to defend the industry’s aura in times of authenticity crisis; and 3) diagnostic and social-mission reframing aimed at recovering the tarnished aura of microfinance. Our paper enriches megamarketing research by charting relevant terrain that stretches beyond the established vectors of legitimacy theorizing and offers important implications for megamarketing practitioners.

Partisan identities do not only shape people’s political attitudes, but also their perceptions of real-world developments. This is evident from the partisan economic perception gap: Government supporters have more positive economic perceptions than opposition supporters, especially when the economic situation is ambiguous. Recent research has shown that the size of this partisan gap varies across different contexts and that the state of the economy and working of political institutions are important moderators. Still, little is known about the influence of another important contextual variable: the degree of partisanship in the media system. Based on a theoretical discussion of partisan-motivated rationalization and the information environment, the paper tests the hypothesis that, due to selective exposure and exposure to more partisan content, people in partisan media systems have more polarized economic perceptions. A multilevel analysis of representative surveys in twenty-six European countries in 2014 shows that the partisan perception gap is, indeed, larger in countries with more polarized media systems, after controlling for other relevant country characteristics. People with the highest level of media consumption are most affected by media-party parallelism. The findings are relevant for worldwide discussions about posttruth politics, as they show that the media environment influences gaps in people’s perceptions of real-world developments.

I denne artikel undersøger vi, 1) hvordan tilliden til danske journalister og nyhedsmedier har udviklet sig over tid, 2) om der er forskel i tilliden til forskellige typer af nyhedsmedier, og 3) hvordan folks politiske partipræference påvirker deres tillid til journalister og nyhedsmedier. Vores analyser baserer sig på omfattende data fra Europa-Kommissionen, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Radius Kommunikation samt DR Medieforskning og viser, 1) at tilliden til journalister og nyhedsmedier er stabil over tid, 2) at folk stoler mere på public service-nyheder og kvalitetsaviser og mindre på tabloide nyhedsmedier, og 3) at partipræference kan forklare nogle variationer i tilliden.

The democratic functions of the media are at the center of discussions about the societal role of journalists (e.g., McNair 2009; Stromback 2005). These democratic functions, like the information, watchdog, and expression function are laid down in legal texts (Graber 2003) and ethical codes (Sonnenberg 1997) and are part of the core values of the occupational ideology of journalists (Kovach & Rosenstiel 2001).

This chapter examines the related concepts of trust in the press and credibility of information. At the heart of concerns about the functions that journalism fulfills in society are worries about the trustworthiness of the press and credibility of public information. In journalism studies and the communication literature more broadly, the terms trust and credibility are closely connected. Communication researchers and journalism scholars started to study the related concepts of credibility and trust in the middle of the 20th century. In the second half of the 20th century, trust in the press became a new topic of scholarly interest. The Elaboration Likelihood Model provides a general framework that helps to understand how credibility judgements are made. Qualitative research into media trust and credibility can give interesting insight into how people assess trust in the media in general as well as the credibility of specific information.

In this article, we examine 1) how trust in Danish journalists and news media has developed over time, 2) whether trust in different types of news media differs, and 3) how people’s party preference affect their trust in journalists and news media. Our analyses are based on comprehensive data from the European Commission, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Radius Kommunikation, and DR Media Research, and show 1) that trust in journalists and news media is stable over time, 2) that people have higher trust in public service news and quality newspapers and lower trust in tabloid news media, and 3) that party preference explains some variations in trust.

What people see and read in the media is no longer only determined by journalists, but increasingly by algorithms. These algorithms select, sort, and prioritize our information. Automatic processes like YouTube’s recommendation algorithm influence our views of the world. An important democratic question is whether YouTube’s recommendation algorithm incidentally exposes the audience to political information after watching entertainment content and whether the algorithm creates a filter bubble by primarily recommending content with a similar political perspective. During the Danish parliamentary elections 2019, the recommendation algorithm was more likely to lead viewers away from news and public affairs than towards political content. After watching a video posted by political parties Venstre or Stram Kurs, the algorithm primarily recommends videos from these same parties, which could strengthen confirmation bias and reinforce political beliefs. For other parties, this was less the case. Little evidence was found that the recommendation algorithm leads viewers from mainstream content to extreme right content.

Journalistic practice emphasizes both positive and negative aspects of news stories. Nevertheless, the effects of ambiguous news, which includes both positive and negative information, are under-investigated. This study examines how exposure to ambiguous economic news affects uncertainty and ‘consumer confidence’. Consumer confidence refers to citizens’ evaluations of their personal economic situation and of the national economy and is an antecedent of economic behaviour. Using a two-wave national panel survey and a media content analysis, the study demonstrates that ambiguous news exposure and individual level changes in consumer confidence are linked. Our analysis suggests that the relation between exposure to ambiguous news and changes in consumer confidence is mediated by economic uncertainty. This article bridges insights from research on consumer confidence, economic psychology and media effects and unravels one of the mechanisms at play in this cross-field.

Although the democratic role of journalism in new democracies is heavily debated, systematic empirical analysis is scarce. This paper studies how the performance of the watchdog and civic journalism role in Chilean newspapers develops during 22 years of democratic transition. We challenge the homogenization-thesis, which has often characterized thinking about the role of the media in democratic transition, assuming an automatic unidirectional trend toward more critical professionalism, where reporters increasingly act as watchdogs by taking the side of ordinary citizens against the political and economic elite. We argue that a rise in critical professionalism is often limited to a brief honeymoon period after the return to democracy. We furthermore argue that to understand changing role performance during democratic transition, one needs to look at specific developments of the media (press freedom, journalism education, advertisement income, and circulation) and developments in the political context, in particular the degree of political conflict. These hypotheses are tested with a unique data set consisting of a content analysis of 20,201 news articles, which make up representative yearly samples of newspaper coverage in Chile between 1990 and 2011. We find no trend toward more watchdog and civic journalism, and limited influences of developments of the media. At least for the performance of these two journalistic roles in Chile, changes in journalism during democratic transition can best be explained by the honeymoon hypothesis and the degree of political conflict. The generalizability of these findings to other transitional democracies is discussed.

Although data journalism is practiced globally, data journalism research has traditionally focused on a limited set of countries, primarily within the liberal and democratic corporatist media systems. Many recently published studies illustrate a growing scholarly interest in data journalism in other parts of the world, but these studies are still limited in number. This special issue brings together five new empirical studies of data journalism around the world, as well as two commentaries and two book reviews on the topic with the aim of broadening the theoretical, empirical, and geographic perspectives on data journalism. The core of the special issue consists of five national and comparative case studies studying data journalism in Africa, the Arab world, Italy, the UK, and Argentina. Combined, these articles and the other publications in this special issue point to three important contextual factors that shape data journalism worldwide: journalistic cultures, media markets, and the political environment. After a discussion of each of these three factors, areas for future research are proposed.

The development of journalism in the Nordic countries has been shaped by two interconnected ideologies: the welfare state and democratic corporatism. International reviews have repeatedly emphasized the similarities of the media systems in these countries. However, less work has been done on the professional identity of individual journalists working within these systems. In this article, the similarities and differences between journalists’ professional values and perceptions in the Nordic countries are explored based on survey data from the Worlds of Journalism Study. The results indicate that despite country-specific variance, Nordic journalists share a vision of their professional identity especially in terms of seeing themselves as detached watchdogs and renouncing the role of opportunist facilitator. Another Nordic characteristic is the low level of experienced economic influence on journalistic work. In important ways, thus, Nordic journalists’ professional views appear to reflect central characteristics of the political culture and media systems in which they work.

Transformations in media and society have forced journalists to reconsider their relation to the audience. In this article, we argue that due to these changes, a new conceptualization is needed of the way journalism addresses the audience, which goes beyond the traditional consumer–citizen dichotomy. Results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with three samples of Chilean news ( N = 1,988; N = 795; N = 812) support the hypothesis that audience approaches in journalism are best represented by a three-factor solution: the infotainment, the service, and the civic models. The data also show that approaching the audience as consumer or as citizen are not two poles of one continuum, and that approaching the audience under a consumer-orientation consists of two approaches: providing service and providing entertainment.

Despite signs of declining press trust in many western countries, we know little about trends in press trust across the world. Based on comparative survey data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS), this study looks into national levels of trust in the press and identifies factors that drive differences across societies and individuals as well as over time. Findings indicate that the widely noted decline in media trust is not a universal trend; it is true for only about half of the studied countries, with the United States experiencing the largest and most dramatic drop in trust in the press. Political trust has emerged as key factor for our understanding of trust in the press. We found robust evidence for what we called the trust nexus—the idea that trust in the news media is strongly linked to the way publics look at political institutions. The link between press trust and political trust was considerably stronger in politically polarized societies. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the relation between press trust and political trust is becoming stronger over time. We reason that the strong connection between media and political trust may be driven by a growing public sentiment against elite groups.

Given the importance of issue competition in a West European context and the growing use of Facebook in elections, this paper studies how politicians use Facebook to shape the campaign agenda. We analyze the issues addressed in 6,388 Facebook posts by candidates in the Danish 2011 parliamentary election. A limited share of Facebook updates is dedicated to issues. The Facebook agenda did not respond to standings in the polls, nor to the media agenda or public agenda. Comparing issue engagement of new candidates and rerunning candidates we find that the Facebook campaign agenda is not simply politics as usual.

One of the normative functions of economic news is surveillance, making monitorial citizens aware of significant economic developments. In this light, it is important to look at the way economic news covers periods of recession and economic boom. Previous studies have focused on how the media cover monthly developments of the economy rather than how coverage varies over the course of the economic cycle. Based on parallels between self-reinforcing news waves or media hypes, on the one hand, and coverage of recession and economic boom, on the other, we argue that the media amplify periods of prolonged economic growth or contraction by making the economy more visible and reporting with an overly positive or negative tone. A time-series analysis of the relation between economic developments and the automatically coded tone and visibility of economic news in Danish newspapers (1996–2012) shows that the media functioned as a magnifying glass. During recession, the economy became more negative and visible than economic developments would predict. During economic boom, economic news became more positive, but not more visible. The media adjusted the tone downwards before the economy entered recession. These results are assessed in light of the surveillance function.

It has recently been claimed that the economy does not exert strong influence on evaluations of incumbent governments in a globalized environment owing to the complex nature of the world’s economy. We question this claim and examine whether and how exposure to economic news affects economic evaluations of governments and how these in turn affect overall government evaluations. The study, which is based on a two-wave national panel study in Denmark (N = 1,280) and a content analysis of the most prominent news outlets (N = 20,127), shows that we are not ready for a paradigm shift: The economy is still important in terms of predicting overall government evaluations, and exposure to economic news drives this relationship. In addition, priming is stronger for individuals who do not discuss the economy.

Television interviews with political candidates are pivotal moments in election campaigns. Previous studies in Anglo-American contexts have shown that adversarialism in television interviews can be predicted by the power of the politician and by the status of the interviewer. However, worldwide the structural conditions of the liberal media system are unique. This article studies how the Anglo-American watchdog model of interviews should be adapted to polarized television markets such as Italy, where broadcast organizations are politically, financially, and historically linked to different political blocks. A content analysis of the level of toughness in questions posed to politicians from different parties during the 2006 and 2008 Italian general elections showed that, in line with the watchdog model, journalists are more adversarial toward politicians who are likely to win the elections. Apart from this, interviews in polarized television markets follow a different model: Interviewers with high status are less adversarial, politicians from minor parties face more threatening questions, and partisan bias is more important than role bias. The generalizability of this model is discussed in the light of the polarization of television markets, partisan segregation, and the potential consequences for vote choice and election outcomes.