Fredrik Stiernstedt

This article introduces the concept of expressive distrust to address persistent puzzles in media trust research. Drawing on a qualitative interview study with Swedish audience members who publicly criticize news media, we argue that distrust is not only an attitudinal stance but also a performative practice shaped by identity, group belonging, and political strategy. Expressive distrust refers to signals of distrust that serve purposes beyond evaluating media performance – such as signaling cognitive virtue, reinforcing social ties, or influencing public discourse. Our findings show that individuals often articulate nuanced views of journalism privately while performing categorical distrust in public, leveraging it as symbolic capital and a tool for political contestation. Conceptually, this challenges linear models of trust/distrust and calls for incorporating performative dimensions into existing typologies. Recognizing expressive distrust is crucial for fully understanding the so-called crisis of trust.

Public service media (PSM) across Europe face ongoing challenges related to declining audience use, particularly among younger generations, who increasingly turn to social media platforms and commercial media. These developments have often been interpreted as signalling a crisis of legitimacy of PSM and their public value. This paper explores such assumptions by examining how young people themselves understand, experience, and articulate the value of PSM. The paper draws upon an exploratory comparative study of focus group discussions conducted with young adults in Sweden and Estonia. The findings show that while participants in both countries rarely use PSM as part of their routine media consumption, they nonetheless attribute significant societal relevance and value to these media. They consistently associate PSM with decommodification, trustworthiness, education, inclusion, accessibility, and national continuity, often defining these values explicitly in contrast to commercial and social media platforms. They were also associated with childhood memories and family rituals. Although these themes were common across the two national contexts, there were differences pertaining to their history and sociopolitical context. We conclude that limited use of PSM among young people does not necessarily signal a lack of recognition of their public value.

Recent global events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, wars and migration streams, have highlighted the promise of digital infrastructures while also showcasing how dependent we are on digital systems for accessing welfare services such as healthcare, social services and education, as well as for accessing public service media. Notably, in the context of welfare provision, different people and social groups are affected in distinct ways by such digital systems. This Crosscurrent contribution conceptualizes the notion of digital vulnerabilities, which captures some of the contemporary challenges posed to societies increasingly interconnected with and dependent on digital systems. Drawing on feminist moral philosophy, we suggest three layers of digital vulnerabilities: vulnerabilities through digital infrastructures, vulnerabilities in digital infrastructures and vulnerabilities of digital infrastructures. We illustrate these three layers with examples from four critical welfare domains, namely healthcare, education, social services and public service media. We conclude with a call for additional empirical research on how digital vulnerabilities play out in practice, across welfare domains and in welfare regimes beyond the Global North. Such issues need to be explored further to meet contemporary challenges.

This article provides a comprehensive review of research on distrust towards news media and journalism, a topic that has gained significant attention in recent years due to declining institutional trust and the rise of political disinformation. We analyse existing literature focusing on how media distrust has been studied and conceptualised, its explanations, and its consequences. We highlight the conceptual diversity and methodological plurality in the field, noting the varied definitions and operationalisations of distrust, as well as the dominance of quantitative approaches alongside significant qualitative contributions. The complex relationship between distrust in the media and democracy is also explored, revealing conflicting evidence on whether distrust leads to news avoidance and reduced political engagement or fosters critical media consumption and political engagement. The review underscores the need for clearer definitions and typologies of distrust, supplementing dichotomous operationalisations of trust/distrust with ones that capture distrust as a multidimensional phenomenon, with each dimension having different antecedents and consequences.

This article contributes to a social history of Swedish broadcasting through an analysis of a movement for media reform: the Swedish Women’s Associations’ Radio Committee, formed in 1933 and operating until 1940. The committee was a joint effort by many established women’s organisations in Sweden, formed with the goal of strengthening the role of women in the developing public service radio, and especially providing a platform for women to raise demands on influence in the decision-making around the development of this new media form. In this article, I analyse the Swedish Women’s Associations’ Radio Committee and their work in the 1930s and ask what they did, how they did it, and with what effects? In what ways can their work be understood as a movement for media reform? The analysis builds on archival material documenting the Swedish Women’s Associations’ Radio Committee, as well as secondary sources such as memoirs and newspaper materials.

Dallas Smythe’s article from 1977 is a milestone in the analysis of the political economy of the media. Here, Smythe argued that the role of communication had not been given sufficient attention within Marxist thought. Smythe formulated a materialist theory of communication, and put issues of class, capitalism, and commodification on the agenda. The article gave rise to key debate in the field of the political economy of the media and of how to understand the complex role(s) of communication within capitalism. Today, Smythe’s text has gained new significance in an era of commercial surveillance and digital commodification in the platform economy.

One of the editors of this book was once a participant in a seminar with a famous French sociologist. The professor gave advice about projects and research ideas to the researchers and doctoral students that were participating. Then, someone asked the question of how best to understand one’s contemporaries and contemporary society. Perhaps the person asking the question had expected an answer about innovative research methods or about which social phenomena could say the most about the times we live in. But the sociologist had other advice. He said: stop following the noise of the news, turn off your feeds, and use the time you earn to re-read sociology’s classic texts. There was silence in the room. Would the way to understand the society of the 21st century go via texts written at the end of the 19th century, by people like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel?

This comprehensive collection introduces and contextualizes media studies’ most influential texts and thinkers, from early 20th century mass communication to the first stages of digital culture in the 21st century. The volume brings together influential theories about media, mediation and communication, as well as the relationships between media, culture and society. Each chapter presents a close reading of a classic text, written by a contemporary media studies scholar. Each contributor presents a summary of this text, relates it to the traditions of ideas in media studies and highlights its contemporary relevance. The text explores the core theoretical traditions of media studies: in particular, cultural studies, mass communication research, medium theory and critical theory, helping students gain a better understanding of how media studies has developed under shifting historical conditions and giving them the tools to analyse their contemporary situation. This is essential reading for students of media and communication and adjacent fields such as journalism studies, sociology and cultural studies.

Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you or endangering what you have rightfully earned, whether by not giving it to you, by directly telling you to abstain from it or by intervening in social processes so that your enjoyment of what you have earned becomes impossible.