Trust and authority in the age of mediatised politics

Abstract

This article examines the role of trust in the age of mediatised politics. Authority, we suggest, can be successfully enacted despite the disrupted nature of the public sphere if both rational and moral trust are utilised to formulate validity claims. Drawing from Maarten A. Hajer's theorisation of authority in contemporary politics, we develop a model of how political actors and institutions as well as the media employ both rational and moral trust performances to generate authority. Analysing a Finnish case of controversial investigative journalism on defence intelligence, we show how the media in network governance need to critically evaluate the authority performances of political actors while at the same time enacting their own authority performances to retain their position within the governing network and to manufacture trust among networked publics. This volatile position can lead to situations where the media compete for authority with traditional political institutions.

Banalisation of communications surveillance in the debate on Finnish intelligence legislation

“…At this juncture, Halminen and Pietiläinen (2017) wrote a news story for HS about military intelligence that was based on leaks of classified information, including images of documents with Top Secret stamps. This caused a minor public scandal, ‘HS-gate’ (see Kortesoja et al, 2019; see also Koivunen and Vuorelma, 2022). Written to raise questions about the new surveillance powers that the government was to give the intelligence authorities, the article emphasised the lack of debate, under a headline declaring that hardly anyone knows what the Defences Forces intelligence research establishment is doing and that the documents received by HS ‘open the mystery’.…”

“…After a few days of media uproar, the Finnish policy elite restored consensus via banal nationalistic references to ‘the Winter War Spirit’ (see Koivunen and Vuorelma, 2022; see also Billig, 1995). A few months later, the parliament demonstrated national unity and loyalty by accepting the amendment of the Constitution as urgent (with 178 in favour and 13 against).…”