Norwegian Journalists’ Attitudes towards Alternative News Media

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, focussing on the relations between professional alternative media as an indication of boundaries in the journalistic field. This connects with a long history of research into field theory and boundary work in journalism.

The present study thus understands journalism as a strategic action field – but even if boundaries are now blurry, they still exist: the actors in governance units (press, industry associations, union, funders) and incumbents (editorial-driven, legacy news media) intersect with each other and together form the field of journalism and produce a collective frame of journalistic institutional rules. The stability of journalism depends on how stable such frames are – and this also includes the symbolic (e.g. trust) and material (e.g. funding) resources on which the field can draw.

Surrounding this are other interests including the state, education, technology, advertisers, and audiences, which variously support or undermine the stability of the journalism industry, as well as explicit challengers such as alternative media that perceive themselves as correctives to the mainstream and may be more or less antagonistic, ideological, and extreme in their criticism. These challengers present competing frames for journalistic rules and practices, and how this plays out may be very different from country to country.

The present project explored this in Norway by interviewing representatives of the various stakeholders in this system of relationships, including alternative media operators and audience members. What emerged from the alternative media is that there are three broad positions: an anti-system position that seeks to destabilise the institution; a critical position that seeks to criticise journalism from the outside; and an integrationist or mainstreaming position that seeks to criticise journalism at least partly also from the inside.

These latter two are much more difficult for the mainstream media to understand: mainstream journalists frame alternative media mainly as disinformation or ‘fake news’, as potentially harmful to the public sphere, as lacking professional ethics, and as categorically different and therefore not true competitors or colleagues, and they emphasise that the institution of journalism remains strong.

One reaction to these groups then is also to tighten the boundaries: the self-regulatory system in Norway is now restricted to members of press and industry associations, which hands more exclusionary power to these organisations and prevents alternative media from joining the field in a formal way. The industry incumbents have also joined together to establish the fact-checking service Faktisk, which now also collaborates with Facebook, and this can also be seen as a defensive gesture against these new alternative outlets.