Gang crime is one of the hottest topics in the Swedish public debate today. At the same time, people’s trust in how the media reports on the topic is low. Trust in news media is important in any democratic society. Understanding how trust in news media is affected by the reporting on a controversial issue is therefore important in maintaining a functional democracy. This paper examines how politically active young adults perceive news on gang crime in Sweden, and how it correlates to their own trust in news media. Also, we study potential differences between two political youth wings, and what role the sender plays in the perception of – and trust in – news on gang crime. Through ten interviews, we find that the sender is paramount in the interviewees’ evaluation of trust in an article on gang crime. However, the information, what sources are quoted, and descriptions are also contributing attributes. Further, we discover that people develop personal strategies to assess their trust in a news piece on gang crime. Applying the theoretical frameworks of Kohring and Matthes (2007) and Strömbäck et al. (2020), we develop an understanding of how attributes contributing to trust in individual news pieces can be viewed in the context of more general trust in news media. In line with previous research, this study highlights the difficulty of defining general trust in terms of distinct factors. We propose that attributes affecting trust in individual articles can be attributes affecting general trust in news media, if occurring as prolonged trends, but call for further research on this hypothesis. In a societal context, this paper also shows that there is still consensus on what makes news trustworthy, even on a topic as highly politicized as gang crime.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-446772 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Fock, Oscar, Höglund, Hugo |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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