Media, Disinformation and Trust in Times of Democratic Erosion: Lessons from Eastern Europe

While research studying the impact of democratic erosion on public communication has flourished, existing conceptual frameworks are often ill-equipped to grasp the nature and depth of recent transformations. Drawing on comparative research conducted over several years in Eastern Europe, this talk will reflect on two issues that attracted significant attention in recent years but need rethinking in light of ongoing democratic erosion: media trust and disinformation. First, using both survey data and semi-structured interviews conducted in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Serbia, I query the assumption that high levels of media trust are an inherently good thing. I show that the parallel decline in media freedom and rise in polarization, along with growing reliance on social media, can lead to a shift in the normative underpinnings of media trust. These changes make it essential to distinguish between trust and trustworthiness, and to understand how people make decisions over what to trust once mainstream media become increasingly untrustworthy. Second, I build on the ongoing analysis of focus groups materials gathered in Serbia, Romania and Poland to challenge prevailing approaches that see disinformation primarily through an epistemic lens and define it with reference to intentionally false or misleading information. To develop a more comprehensive understanding, I draw attention to its moral dimensions and argue that disinformation not only to creates uncertainty over how the world is, but also invites contestation over how the world should be, and over where the boundaries of legitimate public debate should lie.

Sabina Mihelj is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis at Loughborough University. Her research examines the interaction between media, politics, and culture, especially in the context of semi-democratic, authoritarian, and post-authoritarian countries. She is the author of several award-winning books and journal articles, including Media Nations: Communicating Belonging and Exclusion in the Modern World (Palgrave, 2011), From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television, (Cambridge University Press, 2018, with S. Huxtable), Digital Nationalism (Nations and Nationalism, with C. Jiménez-Martínez, 2021 Best Article award) and The Illiberal Public Sphere: Media in Polarized Societies (Palgrave, 2024, with V. Štětka, 2024 Best Book Award, APSA-ITPS). Having made key contributions to debates on media and nationalism, Cold War media and culture, and the transformation of the public sphere in the era of illiberalism, Professor Mihelj’s recent work investigates the citizen engagement with disinformation and the digital sovereignty and their paradoxical impact on belonging, borders and democracy.