Abstract
Journalism scholars have noted a steady rise of skepticism among the public in the latter half of the past century. In order to analyze these strategies we will turn to a specific field, namely that of online news, as this is one of the sites where the threats sketched out above have forcefully come to the surface.
It is exactly at such moments of threat that the truth-claims and strategies of generating trust are most clearly at work. By investigating online journalism, we wish to shed light on three discursive strategies employed in reaction to these threats: A first strategy is the marginalization of rivaling media (through the logics of the constitutive outside) which disarticulates online journalists from the discourse of 'good' and 'professional' journalism.
Secondly, mainstream journalism has tried to maintain its professional identity by normalizing the mainstream online environment which entails limiting the possibilities offered by the online environment and incorporating alternative voices in the mainstream model. Thirdly, we witness a rearticulation of the nodal points embedded in the mainstream discourse.
We may here think of a tendency towards foregrounding the journalist as individual and thus of reinforcing his claims on trustworthiness. Of importance here is also the increasingly interpretative role taken on by the journalist (Hallin 1992: 19) and the growing importance of the public image of journalists in blogs and other writings of an autobiographical nature.
We will contend that these all link up with a reinforcement of journalistic myths that (re)surface in the face of 'the end of journalism'.