Professor warns Iceland’s media crisis threatens society

Iceland’s media market is in a serious crisis, with too little recognition of the importance of high-quality journalism, Professor Valgerður Anna Jóhannsdóttir of the University of Iceland told mbl.is.

Valgerður Anna, who oversees the university’s journalism and news reporting programme, said the market’s development in recent years had been very serious. The decision to discontinue Sýn’s television station had not come as a major surprise, particularly after it became clear that Síminn would not buy Sýn.

“However, this is a very serious matter for Icelandic society,” she said. “We are in a position where we have one daily newspaper and one station that broadcasts television news. A few decades ago, we had five to seven daily newspapers and two strong radio and television stations.”

She said the need for high-quality journalism had increased rather than diminished, even though Iceland’s population had not declined during that period.

“There is enough content available to overwhelm people, but the supply of high-quality, verified information produced through professional journalism, providing the scrutiny needed in democratic societies, is not increasing,” Valgerður Anna said.

She said politics, business and the public often failed to understand journalism’s importance as a social service, one that could not easily be represented in an individual company’s spreadsheet.

Valgerður Anna said there was no single solution to the problems facing the media. International efforts were under way to regulate social media and artificial intelligence, which she said took content from edited media outlets and used it without paying for it. At the same time, advertising revenue and audiences were being taken from the media.

She said Iceland needed an agreement on RÚV and its role in the advertising market, while stressing that RÚV alone was not responsible for the current difficulties.

“It seems to me that most people believe there needs to be a strong public broadcaster here, but there needs to be a social agreement on its presence in the advertising market,” she said.

Valgerður Anna also said polls repeatedly showed that people trusted edited media more than social media. That meant the public had to recognise that producing good, carefully researched news and social coverage cost money.

Businesses also needed scrutiny of the government and other companies, she said, adding that all advertising money could not be poured into social media.