The blog post is based on the presentation by Minna Horowitz (University of Helsinki) at the NORDIS course for investigative journalists at the University of Bergen, 27 March 2026.
The relationship between media literacy and public trust in journalism has never been more consequential than it is today. As artificial intelligence reshapes the information landscape, the Nordic countries find themselves in a paradoxical position: they are among the most digitally advanced, institutionally trusted, and media-literate societies in the world, yet they face mounting pressures that could erode precisely the foundations that made those achievements possible.
Literacy as a Foundation of Democratic Trust
Literacy is not merely a set of technical skills but a disposition — one that combines critical thinking with the capacity to build and sustain trust. These two impulses can appear to be in tension. Critical thinking teaches us to question sources, interrogate motives, and resist manipulation. Trust, by contrast, requires a willingness to extend credibility to institutions and individuals even when certainty is impossible. These are not opposites but complements: a population that understands how journalism works, what its ethical commitments are, and how digital platforms distort information flows is better equipped both to scrutinize media and to recognize when scrutiny confirms rather than undermines reliability.
Journalists should be aware of what literacy encompasses today: It is a series of competencies — from foundational information literacy, through media and information literacy (MIL), to the more expansive concept of multiliteracy — that also includes social media literacy, data literacy, algorithm literacy, and privacy awareness. This multidimensionality of literacy matters because it underscores that navigating today’s information environment is not a single skill but an interlocking set of capacities, many of which are poorly understood even by otherwise educated citizens. People may be adept at finding information online while remaining largely unaware of how algorithmic curation shapes what they see, or how platform business models create incentives for engagement over accuracy.
Trust Is Multidimensional — and Fragile
While trust in journalistic organizations is often measured with simple surveys (“do you trust news outlet xx?”), audiences’ experiences of trust are multidimensional. Trust in media is the product of several overlapping factors: the perceived accuracy of information, the political independence of journalists, the clarity and informativeness of language, the specific outlet or platform in question, the topic being covered, and the individual’s own demographic background, community affiliations, and prior experiences. This means that “trust in the media” as a headline statistic is always somewhat misleading — there is a great deal of variation that matters enormously for understanding why different audiences respond so differently to the same reporting.
Nordic countries have historically benefited from strong institutions across all these dimensions. Public service media remain among the most trusted news sources in their respective countries. Media policy has historically supported press independence and plurality. Digital maturity has reduced dependence on advertising revenue, making editorial decisions less susceptible to commercial pressure. Yet the NORDIS stakeholder interview research of 2023 revealed that Nordic journalism may currently be living on “borrowed time of trust.”
The Urgency of Political and Technological Developments
The urgency for journalists to pay attention to and contribute to literacy is obvious: The arrival of generative AI and its intersection with already concerning trends in disinformation, platform power, and geopolitical information warfare. The data presented from Faktabaari’s analysis of Finland’s information environment illustrates the convergence of several threats: platforms reducing moderation and fact-checking, the MAGA political movement promoting nationalist narratives that challenge EU regulatory frameworks, and Russian and Chinese state actors spreading disinformation through bots, AI tools, and fake news sites. These forces do not operate in isolation; they interact and amplify one another.
Generative AI adds new dimensions to this challenge. It dramatically lowers the cost of producing convincing synthetic media — images, audio, video, and text — that can be used to deceive, impersonate, and manipulate The EU frameworks is an example: the AI Act’s risk-based approach to regulating AI systems and the DigComp3.0 competency framework for digital citizens represent two complementary registers of response — one focused on constraining dangerous technology, the other on equipping people to navigate it.
What Nordic Data Reveals
The empirical data from the NORDIS 2023 study and the NORDEN media literacy survey of 2025 paint a picture that is simultaneously reassuring and sobering. Nordic citizens display high awareness of media power: across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, large majorities — ranging from 83% to 89% — believe the media has a significant impact on public opinion, with somewhat lower but still substantial majorities (68%–77%) believing it influences political decision-making. Citizens broadly understand that journalism wields influence, and this awareness is itself a form of media literacy.
At the same time, Nordic citizens display significant critical distance from that same media. Around 40% believe objective reporting is not possible. More than half believe journalists color the news according to their own opinions, and a similar proportion believe women do not have equal opportunities to voice their perspectives through the media. These are not simply cynical attitudes — they reflect a genuine engagement with journalism’s limitations that a media-literate population might be expected to hold. Criticism born of high expectations differs from disengagement or hostility, and the fact that majorities in all four countries also believe that national media offer a variety of perspectives suggests that critical awareness coexists with ongoing institutional trust.
Yet there is a specific and notable vulnerability: only around half of respondents in each country trust their own ability to detect disinformation. This self-assessed gap in verification skills is striking, particularly in societies with relatively high levels of general education and digital literacy. It suggests that the subjective experience of navigating today’s information environment — characterized by volume, speed, and AI-enhanced deception — is overwhelming even for people who are otherwise competent media consumers.
The NORDEN 2025 data on AI attitudes reinforces this. Citizens are worried about AI’s influence on media content (mean scores around 3.7–3.8 on a five-point scale across all five Nordic countries) and broadly agree that AI makes it harder to determine what is genuine or false. They are more ambivalent about whether AI facilitates journalism — understandable, given both its genuine utility for journalists and its weaponization by bad actors.
The studies show that trust in media is linked to age, in part because different generations have fundamentally different understandings of what “news” and “media” actually are. For younger citizens who consume news primarily through social platforms, the concept of a trusted news outlet may be structurally weaker — not because they are less sophisticated, but because their information environment is more fragmented, more algorithmically mediated, and less tied to the professional gatekeeping that historically anchored media trust.
So What? The Role of Journalists as Educators
NORDIS brings together fact-checkers, other media professionals, and journalism educators with media literacy experts for a reason. Journalists can play a role as “expert educators” in media literacy — not just producers of content but active participants in building the public’s capacity to navigate information. This is a significant expansion of the traditional journalistic role, but it is a coherent one. Journalists, as professionals who spend their careers developing source verification skills, understanding platform dynamics, navigating editorial standards, and wrestling with the ethics of representation and accuracy, possess practical knowledge that most citizens lack.