<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Digitization, new entrants and the disruption of business models prompt concern about the media’s societal mission. The article investigates how media managers conceptualize societal responsibility in an era of turmoil. Based on 20 semi-structured interviews with executive managers of private media companies in Norway and Flanders, the study reveals important differences in the definition of the public interest. While Flemish media managers emphasize brand value, Norwegian managers emphasize societal values, such as educating the public. When comparing managers of traditional and newer companies, a third, more straightforward market logic is also elicited, illuminating the vulnerability of traditional values.
</abstract>

Media disruption and the public interest

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
Over the last decade, strategic attacks on news media institutions and journalists have become an increasingly common feature of populist political communication. The purpose of this article is to identify various strategies that politicians use to criticise the news media and illuminate how the use and circulation of these strategies vary between party types. The article builds on a content analysis of the Twitter feeds of all members of parliament with an active account during the 2018 Swedish election campaign. Results show that political media criticism in Sweden is strongly associated with political personalisation, and it is almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon, though not restricted specifically to populist parties. Public service media rather than newspapers or commercial broadcasters constitute the prime target for political media criticism in Sweden, illustrating the need to take media systemic aspects in to account when analysing media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication.
</abstract>

Media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The creative industries have had a major impact on cultural policy, and it is often argued that these industries can be a vehicle for regional growth. Using regional film production in Norway as a case, I discuss the creative industries, the cluster concept and its impact on policy. I analyse two film policy documents from 2007 and 2015 in order to show how the issue of size and critical mass is an unsettled topic within the creative industries, and I question the relevance of film as an economic and regional development tool in a country with a small film industry, such as Norway. This article shows that the creative industries concept, adopted from international discourses, especially creative industries policies in the UK, has influenced Norwegian film policy, reducing the importance of cultural objectives and increased the focus on the business potential and economic aspects of culture.
</abstract>

Creative Clusters – Urban Utopia or Regional Remedy?: A Nordic perspective on the role of the creative industries in regional development

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article provides a systematic review of laws, guidelines, and best practices related to the Nordic influencer industry as of the year 2020. We highlight some nuanced differences or shortfalls across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and give some policy recommendations to national governments and industry in order to maintain a professional Nordic standard. The article identifies a degree of social, cultural, and economic coherence in the Nordic context that allows for the Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish influencer industries to be viewed as a collaborative entity. It then reviews the status of income and tax procedures, and the regulation of commercial disclosures for influencers in the Nordic region. It is hoped that this research contributes to strengthening the integrity and rigour of the Nordic influencer industry to serve as a model for other regional networks of influencers.
</abstract>

A Review of Formal and Informal Regulations in the Nordic Influencer Industry

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
Combatting disinformation and propaganda has become an increasingly common task in Nordic newsrooms. The independent fact-checking organisations are currently joining forces with journalists in keeping the public informed. To better understand what these organisations do and how they do it, this study investigates the fact-checkers’ challenges and interrelations with traditional journalistic institutions, media literacy organisations, and associated national policymaker institutions in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The study is based on 18 in-depth interviews, and the findings show that fact-checking journalism is considered an important counterpart to traditional news media. However, there are many challenges in countering disinformation in the Nordics – both socioeconomical and policy related – that should be considered when discussing how to maintain and improve on the resilience against disinformation and propaganda in the Nordic media welfare states. The study aims to bring some of these challenges to the fore.
</abstract>

Fact-checkers and the news media: A Nordic perspective on propaganda

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The technocultural disruption triggered by digitization has radically changed the way in which we consume films outside cinemas and transformed content providers’ business models. In Norway, between 2010 and 2016, DVD/Bluray and subscription-based streaming services switched places as major and minor platforms for home video consumption. Hence, home video consumption has migrated from a high-yielding platform at the head of the home video release cycle to a low-yielding platform at the tail end, where films also face tougher competition from drama series and international content tends to surpass local content. A case study of the earnings generated by local films released by a major distributor in this period suggests that home video revenues have diminished, making local films much more dependent on theatrical revenues and vulnerable to changes in cinema-going behaviour.
</abstract>

How streaming services make cinema more important

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
In this introductory article, we discuss the rise of the “classical” theories of propaganda, starting with an historical exposé of the concept, which traces its roots and trajectory through the field of academic analysis. Propaganda is then discussed in relation to other adjacent concepts such as soft power, public diplomacy, nation branding, fake news, and so on. In a third section, the concept of propaganda is discussed in relation to the present datafied world, marked by various forms of crises – of democracy and of the environment, for example. In the last section, the articles included in this themed issue are presented and related to the preceding historical and conceptual discussion.
</abstract>

The return of propaganda: Historical legacies and contemporary conceptualisations

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
The unexpected change in the way media researchers frame the Internet – from a utopia of free speech in the 1990s to a nightmare of spreading propaganda and disinformation in the 2010s – is reminiscent of the founding period of the field in 1880–1920. It was then that, because of the birth of the modern cultural-industrial media system that was put into large-scale propaganda use by governments and other social actors, the foundations of propaganda studies were laid. This is why the work of Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) acquired new actuality. In <italic>Psychology of Crowds,</italic> first published in 1895, Le Bon suggested an explanation for why some people resort to propaganda and why others believe in it. This paper tracks the development of this research tradition from Le Bon to Walter Lippmann, Theodor W. Adorno, and – following the interlude of cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s – the present day. In conclusion, a methodology for explaining the evolution of media studies is advanced, using qualitative-normative propaganda analysis as an illustration.
</abstract>

Media studies, Le Bon’s psychology of crowds, and qualitative-normative research on propaganda, 1880–2020

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
The aim of this contribution is to elaborate on propaganda to better define the term in its constituent parts and to build a conceptual model that can also serve as a programme of study. To this end, I develop a definition of propaganda as the enforcement of ideological goals to manage public opinion. Next, I discuss the complex relationship between truth and propaganda positioned alongside mis- and disinformation and argue true information can be, and often is, used as propaganda. I argue the contextual environment can play an equal role to the message itself in the process of distribution, dissemination, and reproduction of propaganda, particularly in light of the technological developments of Web 3.0. I discuss the crucial role of repetition and stereotypes, alongside “hot” and “banal” propaganda in either long- or short-term use. Lastly, I discuss the relationship between propaganda and its audiences from a cyclical perspective, considering them in their reception and participating role in a propaganda campaign and the consequences of intended and unintended audiences.
</abstract>

Propaganda and the Web 3.0: Truth and ideology in the digital age

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
If Plato’s allegory of information trouble occurred within a torchlit cave, the scale and scope of technical developments in information and communication technologies have not superseded his perennial concerns. Drawing from the sociology of knowledge and objectivity in news, in this article, I examine a set of cases of contested information within American communication. Beyond reductionist approaches to objectivity and falsehood in information, these cases bring to light political and cultural contestation over the presentation, omission, and selection of information, as well as value in speculative information. Taken together, these highlight the need for a framework to cover a range of informational issues. The proposed meta-classification of information’s Other opens an analytical space not only to account for today’s alleged information disorder, but also to address long-standing concerns with information order.
</abstract>

Guarding information’s Other: Theorising beyond information and communications technologies for disinformation

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
This article contributes to the growing field of critical studies about the visual politics of the green transition by highlighting the role of communication and the creative industries in promoting “green” ideologies. “The Swedish Mine” advocacy advertising campaign, launched in 2021, is presented as a case study to illustrate how lifestyle advertising genres are used to leverage the emotional engagement of progressive, mining-sceptical urban audiences to increase the social acceptance of intensified mining despite increasing climate awareness. Using visual culture studies, feminist, and critical race theory approaches to analyse the campaign materials, I explore how the campaign aestheticises “green” industrial progress by tokenising multiculturalism, fetishising consumption, and romancing national identity. As a counterpoint, I examine how social media reactions and activist responses illustrate tensions between mining acceptance and mining resistance in Swedish society. I conclude by positioning the campaign rhetoric in various forms of climate propaganda and highlighting the limits of the engineering of public consent for a “green” transition when such attempts use emotions as sites of “cognitive extraction” to cover technological and capitalist imperatives that ultimately promote Sweden as a leading mining nation.
</abstract>

What would a Swedish mine be without a party? On metals, minerals, and love during the “green” transition: Climate propaganda in The Swedish Mine advertising campaign

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>ABSTRACT</title>
This essay studies the propaganda language of contemporary – or late – fossil capital. Whereas the traditional understanding of propaganda focuses on the dissemination of information (or disinformation) in order to promote a political cause or ideology, I argue that the main form and vehicle of propaganda for late fossil capital is the massive use of terms and tropes, together with particular rhetorical devices, for example, the interpellation of the individual consumer as responsible for mitigating climate change. The essay studies the language of fossil capital based primarily on marketing material by fossil fuel companies, in the US and other Western countries, such as advertising and advertorials, current and archived websites, social media, corporate sustainability reports, as well as material produced by industry organisation such as the American Petroleum Institute and the Heartland Institute. A large part of the material is taken from two North American legal complaints, <italic>Connecticut v. Exxon Mobil Corporation</italic> (2020) and <italic>City of New York v. Exxon Mobil Corp. et al.</italic> (2021).
</abstract>

The language of late fossil capital

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
During 2017 and 2018, the #metoo hashtag united a global movement against sexual abuse and harassment. In Sweden, a large portion of the attention was given to the voices of working women, who organised and wrote petitions that were published in news media. Previous research has found that media reports of sexual abuse often focus on singular stories, rather than describing the underlying structural problems, and that the problem is often framed as an individual rather than structural problem. This article accounts for a qualitative content analysis of the first 28 published #metoo petitions in Sweden, with the goal of understanding how these framed the issue. In contrast to previous research, this study shows how the petitions established a coherent feminist explanatory framework that placed the problems on a structural level by focusing on work environments and framing demands in terms of general and perfectly reasonable human rights.
</abstract>

Legitimising a Feminist Agenda: The #metoo petitions in Sweden 2017–2018

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
News automation is an emerging field within journalism, with the potential to transform newswork. Increasing access to data, combined with developing technology, will allow further inquiries into automated journalism. Producing news text using NLG (natural language generation) is currently largely undertaken in specific, predictable news domains, such as sports or finance. This interdisciplinary study investigates how elite media representatives from Finland, Europe and the US imagine the affordances of this emerging technology for their organization. Our analysis shows how the affordances of news automation are imagined as providing efficiency, increasing output and aiding in reallocating resources to pursue quality journalism. The affordances are, however, constrained by such factors as access to structured data, the quality of automation and a lack of relevant skills. In its current form, automated text generation is seen as providing only limited benefits to news organizations that are already imagining further possibilities of automation.
</abstract>

Unboxing news automation

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The final years of the 2010s marked an upturn in coverage on climate change. In Sweden, legacy media wrote more on the issue than ever before, especially in connection to the drought and wildfires in the summer of 2018 and the Fridays for Future movement started by Greta Thunberg. Reporting on climate change also reached unprecedented levels in the growingly influential far-right media ecosystem; from being a topic discussed hardly at all, it became a prominent issue. In this study, we use a toolkit from critical discourse analysis (CDA) to research how three Swedish far-right digital media sites reported on climate during the years 2018–2019. We show how the use of conspiracy theories, anti-establishment rhetoric, and nationalistic arguments created an antagonistic reaction to increased demands for action on climate change. By putting climate in ironic quotation marks, a discourse was created where it was taken for granted that climate change was a hoax.
</abstract>

Scare-quoting climate: The rapid rise of climate denial in the Swedish far-right media ecosystem

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Recent years have seen another peak in global media attention to climate change. Driven by increasingly dire news about extreme weather, growing demands of systemic adaption and a new wave political activism, the current situation has increasingly been framed as a climate <italic>crisis</italic>. This introductory essay maps these recent developments and elaborates the conceptual potentials and limitations of the “crisis” frame. It also briefly reviews the state of the art of media research and situates the contributions of the issue into this landscape.
</abstract>

Media and the Climate Crisis

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The domestication concept, originally developed in Britain in the context of media appropriation in households’ everyday life, has seen a relatively high uptake in the Nordic countries from early on. This was by far not only an application of the concept, but an alternative interpretation with different emphases. I introduce two major strands of this uptake in this article: the Norwegian science and technology studies interpretation, and the primarily Finnish consumer and design research interpretation. These case studies will help answer the question of the degree of Nordicness in these interpretations of the domestication approach. In a last instance, the article aims to address the question what the current – and hopefully future – state of domestication research in the Nordic countries could look like.
</abstract>

(The domestication of) Nordic domestication?<xref ref-type="fn" rid="j_njms-2020-0005_fn_001">1</xref>

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Nordic Journal of Media Studies

A journal published by Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden

About the journal  Established in 2019, Nordic Journal of Media Studies is published once a year, and each volume focuses on a particular theme of media research....

About the journal  Established in 2019, Nordic Journal of Media Studies is published once a year, and each volume focuses...

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

A journal published by Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden

All Volumes and Issues in this Journal