Media resentment

Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you or endangering what you have rightfully earned, whether by not giving it to you, by directly telling you to abstain from it or by intervening in social processes so that your enjoyment of what you have earned becomes impossible.


Introduction
Reports worldwide are telling of diminished trust in the news media (Flew, 2021), and there is an ongoing discussion on how suspicion and contempt towards journalism are growing (Carlson et al., 2021).Many have taken this situation as a problem and threat to democracy and reason (Dahlgren, 2018;Neuberger et al., 2023).But how can we understand this expression of discontent towards the media and journalism?In this article, we develop the concept of 'media resentment', which we consider to be a useful tool when trying to understand contemporary developments.The concept of resentment has been developed in a range of studies within political science and sociology during the last decades (e.g.Hoggett et al., 2013), especially in the United States (Banning, 2006;Engels, 2015;McVeigh and Estep, 2019).When such works discuss issues of media and journalism, they mainly focus on how resentment and populist imaginaries are constructed or even legitimized in journalistic discourse (e.g.Conrad, 2021;Creech, 2020;Esser et al., 2016;Jacobs and Munis, 2023); however, the concept of resentment has not been used to any significant extent in efforts to understand the feelings people express towards 'the media', journalism or journalists.
The purpose of this article is to develop the concept of 'media resentment', that is resentment specifically directed towards and experienced in relation to the media and journalistic content.We ask: what is media resentment?What different dimensions of media resentment are there?How is media resentment expressed in discourse?Although this is mainly a conceptual article, we draw on examples from an ongoing interview study on trustand the lack thereofamong Swedish news media users to develop our argument.
What is there to gain from developing the concept of media resentment?We argue that this concept is one path to understanding what has been labelled as an ongoing 'trust crisis' in the field of media and journalism.As several scholars have noted, there is no universally accepted definition of media trust (Blöbaum, 2021;Fisher, 2016), and the lack of trust, along with its causes and effects, has also been discussed in various ways using a range of different concepts, including media scepticism (Quiring et al., 2021), media cynicism (Markov and Min, 2022), mistrust or distrust (Jakobsson and Stiernstedt, 2023), or the 'hostile media effect' (Schulz et al., 2020).We believe that the concept of 'media resentment' might help to further our understanding of audiences' complex web of cognitive and emotional evaluations of the media.Crucially, this concept makes it possible to situate and analyse these cognitive and emotional evaluations of the media in relation to socio-political conditions and ideological struggles.Although media resentment is a feeling that is experienced and expressed by individuals, it is not only a psychological construct but also a sociological concept: the concept points towards the intersection between individual assessments of the media and the wider web of social and political relations in which individuals' evaluations of the media are formed and shaped.
The article starts with a discussion on the concept of media resentment, and theorizes this concept as a 'complex of feelings' following the work of sociologist Ian Burkitt.To reach a working definition of the concept of media resentment we then turn to an interview study conducted in Sweden ( 2023) through which we analyse the key dimensions of the concept.The article concludes by suggesting a definition of media resentment and discusses its uses and applicability in relation to other concepts and feelings, mainly anger and media mis/distrust.

Media resentment as an emotional complex
What, then, is media resentment?It is quite obvious that there is anger and hostility towards the media, with accusations of so-called 'fake news' as one of the most visible signs. 1  Carlson et al. (2021) suggest that journalists have been declared 'the enemy' by populist politicians.In order identify and distinguish media resentment from other related feelings it is thus necessary to first develop a theoretical understanding of resentment.
Resentment is usually described as a feeling that revolves around the experience of something being unfair.As such, it can be a catalyst for political participation, calling people into action (Barbalet, 1998).In sociology, resentment and anger have been shown to play a role in how people form political identities and act to address political and social issues (Hochschild, 2016).Growing inequalities and divides between the city and the countryside are examples of things that have been discussed as the root causes of resentment in the literature.For Hoggett et al. (2013: 571), focusing on resentment involves attending to 'how, at a societal level, our emotional responses correspond to complex configurations or organized patterns of affect and connected ideas, subject positions and identities '. Schnedier (2023:170), in a way similar to Hoggett et al. (2013), summarizes resentment as consisting of a number of different components.He describes it as a grievance resulting from injury.This injury is inflicted by someone identified as an 'other': someone outside of one's own group or with a different social identity.The injury is also perceived as a moral wrong or as an injustice.Furthermore, resentment is often not only an individual feeling but is nurtured by political ideologies and by political leaders.This also implies that resentment is not only a feeling, but an idea or a cognitive construct, identifying victims and perpetrators, their motives and relationships.
Our understanding of media resentment follows in line what the authors above have identified as resentment.We understand media resentment as an emotional complex, consisting of a feeling, social relationships and as an idea, expressed in discourse.Before moving on to the empirical parts of the article, we will provide a short theoretical context and background to this understanding, by situating it within research on the sociology of emotions.
Drawing on Raymond Williams' (1977) concept of 'structures of feeling', Burkitt (1997: 37) argues that emotions are 'complexes rather than things'.Emotions are corporeal and embodied, but they are also social and relational.Furthermore, they are both ideal that is, related to culture and meaningand material, in a way that can make them unruly in relation to cultural registers and vocabularies.Here we follow Burkitt (1997), and take feelings (or affects) as not only 'expressed in discourse' but also 'completed in discourse', meaning that it is through communication that feelings become articulated into emotions, but also that feelingsas bodily experiencescan be captured, configured and re-configured in various ways by cultural scripts and discourses (Wetherell, 2012: 24).
The idea of an 'emotional complex', as developed by Burkitt, is helpful in unpacking the concept of resentment.Media resentment is relational, in the sense that it is based on a form of social comparison: am I (or is my group) treated better or worse than other people or groups of people?Are those differences in treatment just and fair?It is also relational in the sense that the feeling can be shared in a group and elaborated discursively.The people we interviewed for this article were all active in social media forums (where we recruited them for participation in this study) in which they discussed various political and social matters, including media and culture.In these forums, resentment is being justified and legitimizedand, in a sense, createdthrough collective discursive processes.In such processes, narratives and discursive tools are developed within and through discussion.There is also a range of actors that deliver these discursive tools to our informants: namely, political organizations and movementsin this case, mainly right-wing populist movementsthat not only 'channel' existing feelings of discontent towards the media (and the media elite) but also facilitate a discourse that is productive of these feelings.Furthermore, media resentment is tied to social identities and is felt differently in different social groups.Among our respondents, strong media resentment was often expressed in ways that aligned with a feeling of resentment regarding social status.Thus, there is a need for a social analysis of media resentmenta relational analysis that focuses not only on the micro-level, where media resentment is formed in both online and offline social networks, but also on the macro-level, taking into account the social relationships between groups and identities.
Media resentment then, in contrast to other forms of resentment, is thus based on certain understanding of social relationships involving the media.According to this understanding the idea that 'the media' or 'the media elite' are a wielder of powera form of power that is symbolic and mainly expressed through media content.How 'the media' use this power has social consequences.When these social consequences are understood as being unfair in some sense, an embryo of media resentment can be created.This resentment can relate to how the media exercise their symbolic power (e.g.reporting, representing, etc.), but it can also relate to how symbolic power has been granted to the 'media elite' (e.g. the feeling that the people in the media do not deserve their position).Such an embryo of resentment might grow due to personal psychological reasons, or it might be nurtured and grown in communication with others and through political mobilization (e.g. by populist parties).Whether or not there are grounds for feeling media resentmentthat is, whether or not the media use their symbolic power in unfair waysis not decisive for the question of whether someone experiences media resentment.Importantly, media resentment may not even have much to do with experiences of the media at all: as discussed by Hoggett et al. (2013), resentment is a feeling whose object can shift, so that, for example, the media can become objects of resentment even though they have little to do with the actual unfair treatment that gave rise to the feeling from the outset.
From this preliminary outline of the concept of media resentment, we now turn to our interviews.Some voices from the material will serve the purpose of bringing further nuance and detail to what we refer to as media resentment, leading to a more elaborated suggestion of how media resentment can be defined.

Method
The empirical material used in this analysis comes from an interview study focusing on media trust and its connection to social imaginaries.The research was carried out in Sweden, which is a social context with high levels of both political trust and media trust.Although general trust levels are high, trust is polarized, with right-wing voters being less trusting than left-wing voters.In particular, voters for the right-wing populist party the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) have lower political trust and media trust (Andersson, 2019).
The recruitment of respondents was mainly carried out online.We contacted people in Facebook groups and Twitter threads addressing questions about Swedish news media and journalism.Thus far, we have carried out 92 interviews online using videoconference software.Most respondents were recruited because they expressed mistrust or scepticism towards Swedish news media and journalists, and 57 of the informants are, by us, defined as 'low-trusters'.The material analysed in this article comes from interviews among this group.The respondents are spread out across Sweden, from North to South, and are located in both cities and in rural areas.70 out of 92 informants are men.The average age is 53 years, with the youngest being 24 and the oldest 80 years old.The 57 informants that we focus on in this article mirror how media mistrust is distributed across the political landscape in Sweden, expressing almost exclusively right-wing political sympathies and viewpoints.Even if media resentment can be felt and expressed within other social and political groupings, for example, ethnic minorities, that is outside of the scope of the analysis presented here.
The interviews were semi-structured and started with background questions about the respondents' current life situation before discussing the subjects of news media use, news media quality, news media trust, media politics and the role of journalism in society.Towards the end of the interviews, we broadened the discussion to include our respondents' views on Swedish politics and Swedish society.Here, we particularly focussed on our respondents' ideas and feelings about broader social developments, the past and the future, and how the respondents perceived their own place within the societal development.The interviews lasted around 1 to 1.5 h and we followed the same interview guide for all 92 informants in the study.
For the analysis in this article, we relied on our notes from the interviews, in combination with to re-listening to audio-recordings of the interviews.We were motivated to approach the analysis in this wayrather than by relying on transcriptionsbecause emotions are expressed in many different ways, beyond just the choice of words.Emotions are also conveyed through the tone of the voice and the pace of speaking.Conducting an analysis of emotions using transcriptions thus becomes problematic: either valuable information must be discarded, or a great deal of effort must be spent to transcribe all the subtleties that are not put into words.We saw no value in conducting such a detailed transcript; instead, we used the recordings as our empirical material.Listening to the material was accompanied by detailed notetaking, noting not only what was said at different times but also how it was said.The analysis was conducted in a thematic way, with media resentment as the main focus.The themes developed in the analysis thus consisted of different aspects and expressions of media resentment.As the analysis developed, our pre-understanding of media resentment changed, so we returned to the material and took new notes.It is also important to acknowledge that the research project as such started with questions about media trust, distrust, and scepticism.The idea to look into the literature on resentment and develop a thematic analysis around that concept came from a perceived inadequacy of the original concepts in analysing the empirical material.We will discuss this inadequacy and the benefits of media resentment as an analytical concept in the concluding discussion.
In what follows, we mainly use examples from three of our informants to further elaborate what we mean by media resentment.In this study, all names have been anonymized to preserve the privacy of the respondents, and in this article we refer to the respondents as Sven, Thomas and Martin.However, the analysis does not only draw from these three respondents.
Rather, these three respondents are used as illustrative examples of the main themes and recurring patterns in our material.They were chosen as examples as they expressed typical features among those expressing media resentment in the material.They each highlight important, but different, aspects of the phenomena, that are found across the material as a whole.We also use selected quotes from other informants, but in order to make it easy to read and follow the analysis, the other respondents are not provided with pseudonyms.

Defining media resentment
Hostility, anger, disappointment and animosity towards 'the media', journalism and journalists permeated most of the interviews we conducted for this project.There are many ways to describe the feelings our respondents expressed towards the news media.In this section, we use our empirical material to elaborate a definition of media resentment as an emotional complex, in order to develop a conceptual grounding for future research on audiences' feelings towards the media.

The media helped take what was rightfully mine
Sven (interview 38) is 80 years old and lives in the south of Sweden, where the support for the populist right-wing party the Sweden Democrats is high.We encountered Sven in a Facebook group focussed on criticism of Swedish public service media.Sven is very emotional when he talks to us and he is both sad and angry because of the injuries inflicted upon him by Swedish Public Radio (SR), Swedish Public Television (SVT) and other legacy news media institutions, but also by politicians and bureaucrats.He feels like he is being treated unfairly, as though something has been taken away from him.His resentment stems from the fact that, at the age of 80, he still has to work in the fishing industry, to support himself and his wife.He feels that, after a long working life in an industry that has contributed to the growth of the Swedish economy, he deserves to be able to go into retirement, but is being denied that chance by politicians and bureaucrats, supported by the Swedish news media.According to Sven, 'Swedes, as a category, have been side-lined' in the public discussion, as well as by economic and political developments, and public money has been spent on immigrants instead of on those who have contributed to creating the public wealth that is now being squandered.However, the negative consequences of immigration are being lied about in the mainstream media.
There are more people like Sven in our empirical material, and we recognize his descriptions of the world of politics and media from previous research, mainly from the United States.Elite supportespecially for immigrantsis prominent in Sven's story and is offered as an explanation for feelings of resentment towards the media.In other interviews, similar attitudes are displayed; instead of immigrants, however, it may be elite support for feminists or for climate activists that is the main motif in the story.Sven, and others like him, are thus part of a group that has been at the centre of many analyses during the last years, in attempts to explain the rise of right-wing populism.This group is found in non-urban areas; it is less educated than its urban counterpart, and it has suffered from economic hardships (e.g.Cramer, 2016;Hochschild, 2016).
Another thing that unites Sven with many of our other respondents is the idea of the news media as a powerful social actor, and journalists as responsible for the ills that have befallen them.Especially before social media became popular and more widely used in Sweden, the news media managed to 'silence' their opponents and conduct 'witch hunts' to drive their opponents away, as another of our respondents puts it (Interview 28).Often this idea is connected to positive reporting on immigration and immigrants, which is claimed to have influenced public opinion in Sweden in such a way that politicians and Swedish citizens in general have been blinded and not seen the negative consequences of Swedish immigration policies.It is a good thing, several of the respondents claim, that social media nowadays challenges the previous monopoly that the news media has had with regards to influencing the public opinion.
The two most important aspects of media resentment is thus, first, that the news media and journalism are viewed as powerful social actors, whose reporting has social consequences.Secondly, that the reporting of the news media has had personal consequences for the respondents, who have been bereaved of things that they had rightfully earned.We have also located this particular aspect of media resentment to a social group that has featured frequently in previous analyses of resentment as a political feeling.Resentment, however, according to Samo Tomšič(2023: 100), 'is not a class affect'; rather, it is found among 'workers, middle-class, and financial elites alike'.Neither is resentment only found among people with a 'rural consciousness' (Cramer, 2016), based on a conflict between country and city.Thus, to understand the different forms of media resentment, we now turn to another typical example from our interviews.

The media threaten what I now have
Thomas (interview 68) is an entrepreneur from the north of Sweden.He has been a Swedish citizen for most of his life, but has a different ethnic background.He runs a business manufacturing supplies for the medical industry.Thomas's resentment towards the media is less palpable than Sven's.At the beginning of the conversation, he states that he is 'not one of those people' that distrust the media.As the interview continues, however, Thomas slightly raises his voice and begins to talk a little faster, especially when he opts to talk about environmental journalism.'I am terrified', he says, 'when journalists talk about degrowth as a solution to the climate crisis'.Journalists, Thomas says, have no understanding of economic principles and do not understand where their unfounded speculations would lead.Environmental news reporting is dangerous and can eventually lead to economic ruin.Like Sven, Thomas thus harbours resentment towards the media for endangering both Sweden's and Thomas's personal economic well-being.Unlike Sven, Thomas is well off; nevertheless, Thomas fears that, if the journalists get their way, he will end up in a much worse situation than he is in now.
Thomas furthermore claims that journalists are hypocritical, since journalists can afford to be anti-business because of the Swedish system of press subsidies that ensures that journalists will be able to make a living, even as they destroy the Swedish business environment and the conditions for free enterprise.Similarly, in another interview, the respondent says that if the news media can't survive on their own without state support, then maybe they shouldn't exist.Sweden is becoming poorer as a country, but that doesn't bother journalists who work in public service media, since they are not dependent on earning their money on the free market (Interview 32).
The most important aspect of media resentment that we have highlighted in this part of the analysis is thus that resentment is not only about having had something taken away, it can also be about the fear of losing something in the future, due to incompetent or hypocritical news reporting.This part of the analysis has also highlighted that media resentment is not only found in social groups that have been 'left behind' (Schneider, 2023:170), but also among people who live relatively affluent lives.This also points to the fact that media resentment is not necessarily an emotional complex centred on the individual.It can also be connected to ideas about how one's country or one's social identity or social group is being threatened or bereaved of something by the news media.

The media do not show me the respect I deserve
Like Sven, Martin (interview 73) is retired.In his working years, Martin was an engineer; later, towards the end of his career, he worked as a university teacher in engineering.Hence, Martin is well-educated and has held high status in his community in many ways.When we interviewed him, he was enjoying the spring season at his holiday cottage.Martin described how he has been a heavy consumer of news media for most of his life.He always read two dailies, and he bought one of the evening papers every afternoon, while out getting cigarettes.He talks about this as an important routine that he maintained for most of his life, describing his desire for news as almost as strong an addiction as his need for nicotine.He also consumed radio and television news (both public service) for most of his life.With some nostalgia, Martin talks about how journaliststo his mindused to be highly respected figures in society and in his community, and that they also used toin his viewexpress a strong professional ethos and self-respect.But, Martin argues, this has changed.With disappointment in his voice, he describes his realization of this change in journalism about 10 years ago, after which he made an active decision to quit consuming the news altogether: 'not one more penny, I decided, that I would give to this industry'.Since then, Martin has mainly sought to cater to his information needs with foreign news outlets (i.e.French, German and British), as well as alternative online media.
Such a change of behaviour was described by many of our informants.For Martin, this change was strongly connected to the idea of respect.His decision to stop using the Swedish mainstream news outlets was because he feels, as he says, 'offended' by their way of addressing him (i.e.their audience) and describing reality to him.'It is as if they think I'm unintelligent', he says.Moreover, Martin believes that the news mediaand journalists in generalshow no respect to their audiences or to themselves.He says, 'I'm quite careful with myself to try to bring out some kind of truth', and he considers that the news media show no respect for either the truth or for him as an individual seeking to find out about the truth.This criticism has several dimensions.For one thing, it points to the perceived increase in 'irrelevant' newsthat is, gossip, entertainment, pseudo-problems, and so forththat Martin thinks takes up too much space in the news media.A second dimension concerns the perception of the media as wanting to decide what you should think and how you should feel about certain issues; that is, they try too much to form 'good' citizens with 'correct' opinions, instead of telling the truth as it is.Thirdly, Martin considers that the media's disrespect for him as the audience and for the journalistic mission connects to a perceived political bias among the journalists (to the left), which Martin thinks undermines their journalistic professionalism: 'Nowadays, the journalists have an agenda, and they don't shy away from writing anything whatsoever these days […] they have no respect for the truth anymore […] and honestly, I can't stand it, I feel offended'.Like many of the informants, Martin does not consider the problem to be that many journalists are left leaning, even though he thinks that this is the case; rather, he considers the problem to be that journalists allow these personal beliefs to overshadow their journalistic mission.Martin does not want to be told what to think and, as he feels that the media are trying to do that, he considers them to be showing a lack of respect towards him as their audiencea respect that he thinks he deserves.
The theme of respect reoccurs throughout our interviews.Thomas also mentions this as he experiences that journalists tries to tell him what to doand, particularly, what not to do.Being told to abstain fromor not to take part inthe enjoyment that one feels that one rightfully deserves seem to create feelings of deep resentment.Thomas exemplifies this by referring not only to a public service climate journalist who, allegedly, tells viewers to fly less, but also to an economy reporter who blames economic inflation on greedy business owners, implying that the profit they make is not rightfully earned and not theirs to enjoy.This is, once again, connected to hypocrisy.While journalists want to lecture their audience and tell them how to behave, they themselves do not live up to their own standards, such as climate reporters that travel internationally by air to cover climate-related news, or journalists that give support to political arrangements that will make things worse for everyone else.This is experience as disrespectful, not only because of the apparent hypocrisy, but also because the journalists allegedly think that the audience will not notice it.
The theme of respect highlights an aspect of media resentment that has not been touched upon in the two previous empirical and analytical parts of the article.While in these previous parts media resentment was felt due to the indirect consequences of the symbolic power of the news mediathe news media influenced social developments in a harmful waythe moral wrong is in this instance a direct consequence of the symbolic power of the media, in the form of disrespect and a lack of recognition.The lack of respect is connected to journalists as a group: they are perceived as an undeserving but privileged group, elevated in the public discourse.In realty, Martin and other informants, express that they are an incompetent professional group which survives due to subsidies and state support, and they argue that on meritocratic grounds their voice should be heard over the voice of journalists.That this third dimension of media resentment often is given a historical dimension is probably related to the fact that most of our respondents are quite old.The feeling that the world now is run by the younger generation and that the older generation does not get the respect it deserves is most likely a feeling that is felt more widely than in our particular sample of respondents.But it probably also says something about Sweden as an outlier when it comes to media system and the trust that Swedes have had towards the media, both historically and now (Syvertsen et al., 2014).
The public discussion, as relayed and produced by the news media, is out of the control of our respondents.Therefore, one thing that unites our respondents is the will to exert power over the public narrative and to be able to change the public discussion.Mostif not allof our respondents thus support political initiatives from Swedish right-wing parties that, for example, aim to defund public service media or establish increased political control over the news media.
Of course, right-wing populism is an important context overall for media resentment.As a political movement, right-wing populism has been associated with resentment (Betz, 1993;Ferrari, 2021), and it has been noted that the emotional messaging strategy of this political movement has been effective in reaching out on social media (Govil and Baishya, 2018).The social media platforms from which we recruited our respondents provide fertile ground for the spread of such messages, although we did not include this wider communication environment in our analysis.Nevertheless, this article can contribute to such an analysis by highlighting the need to treat media resentment not only as a pre-existing structure of feeling that is waiting to be exploited by right-wing populist politicians or as something that is solely produced by populist messaging.Media resentment builds upon a complex pattern of feelings and ideas that interacts with populist communicators and the communicative context in the form of social media platforms and so-called 'alternative media'.Populism as a worldview has been effective in connecting the disparate elements constituting media resentment into a more-or-less coherent whole, but these connections could have been formed differently.
It is not possible to derive any straightforward lessons from our material for the news media, in terms of how they should respond to media resentment.One pessimistic lesson regards how Swedish news media have reported on immigration.For many of our informants, their grudge against the news media began with this issue: it was the news media's reluctance to 'tell the truth' about immigration that got them to start questioning journalism and seeing the media as partisan, unreliable or as a political enemy.However, several of our respondents say that they now feel vindicated by the reporting on this issue in recent years.Following the European immigration crisis in 2015, the public discussion and media reporting in Sweden has shifted towards a more restrictive view on immigration (Ekman and Krzyżanowski, 2021).Nevertheless, this shift has not changed the respondents' feeling of resentment towards the media; rather, for many of our respondents, the opposite seems to be the case.Either the change in the media reporting happened too late or the change is insufficient, according to our respondents.The respondents also remark that they do not receive respect or recognition for having spoken up against immigration before the turn in the public discussion.Their feelings of resentment are thus strengthened, as they see themselves as being deprived of recognition for the fact that they were the ones 'telling the truth' about immigration all along.Thus, it seems that the news media are to blame, regardless of what is being reported.
Media resentment is related to other feelings that people have in relation to the news media.As shown in the analysis our respondents were sometimes sad and sometimes angry and some expressed feelings of nostalgia.It is however necessary to separate and distinguish these emotional expressions from each other.Media resentment, as defined here, is a specific emotional complex that cannot be equated to any of the other feelings expressed by our respondents.Trust and mistrust towards the media can