Abstract
This article examines how recent changes in the hybrid media environment have led media actors to define the “how and why” of their practices. We consider the discussion on the differences and similarities surrounding both the legacy media, and newcomers such as countermedia, to be part of journalism’s boundary work: the ongoing, yet temporally fickle, process of marking the boundaries between journalism and non-journalism. We demonstrate how both legacy and countermedia actors drew boundaries through vocabulary, institutional reflection, demarcation practices, and ethos. While the Finnish media underlined its institutional autonomy and dominance by defending the social good of journalism and dubbing countermedia as fake media, countermedia actor MV-lehti drew its own boundaries by ridiculing media professionals, media institutions, and journalists. Our findings illustrate how these actors consistently asserted the flawed ideological foundations of “the other”, with the consequence that boundaries have become fortified, rather than crossed or blurred.
Highlights
This article examines how recent changes in the hybrid media environment have led media actors to define the “how and why” of their practices
The research question in this article is: what kind of boundary work was stimulated by the fake news phenomenon and the new countermedia websites in Finnish media between 2014 and 2018? We address this question empirically, by analyzing how selected Finnish media reacted to the evolution of countermedia actors, and how the most prominent countermedia, MV-lehti1, positioned itself with regard to journalism and traditional mass media outlets
We argue that new digital publishers – including countermedia – have challenged, and will challenge, journalism in the short to medium term
Summary
This article explores the popular use of the concept fake news and how it was used to describe and analyze changes in the mediasphere, politics, and democracy in Finland. In mainstream discussions certain non-mainstream websites have been clumsily categorized as fake news, prompting scholars to generate more appropriate formulations to capture variant actors, whose content is not all fake, as in “made up” (Ylä-Anttila et al, 2019) In contesting this narrative, these websites have been further defined as countermedia (see Toivanen et al, 2021; Hopp et al, 2020; Ylä-Anttila et al, 2019), alternative media (see Nygaard, 2020; Schulze, 2020; Holt, 2018), and hyperpartisan media (see Rae, 2020; Heft et al, 2020). Digital platforms have taken an increasingly important role in journalism by shaping the way people communicate and mediating the interaction between actors It is certainly arguable, that the changes in both the media environment and the landscape of news, have amplified reconsiderations and rearticulations of what journalism is, and what its role in a functioning democracy should be. This explains why transparency is seen as an emerging ideal that configures the boundaries of journalism, possibly surpassing its ideological commitment to control (Hermida, 2015; Singer, 2015)
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