Reporting on the polarised ‘forest issue’: sensitive terminology, complex relationships, and centrifugal effects as challenges for journalistic role performance

As the climate and biodiversity crises rapidly evolve, discussions about how forests should be governed and managed have intensified. In Sweden, the interests at stake are reflected in conflicting positions among established stakeholders, scientific disputes, and a polarised public forest debate. In this context, media's important democratic function is to provide citizens with balanced and pertinent information. This is, however, associated with challenges that deserve more attention from social science forest research. This study explores how Swedish journalists navigate tensions and complexities when covering the forest issue, and how the polarised character of the forest issue impacts their journalistic roles. A qualitative study of 17 semi-structured interviews with journalists suggests that they experience the forest issue as an “internal bubble” of conflicting interests, in which they need to: grapple with a diversity of expert information and sources; manage complex social networks; and be careful with choice of words, to avoid upsetting different parties. Forest coverage is endowed with “centrifugal effects”, which pull the journalists into one of the polarised ends of the public forest debate, namely production versus protection, and where they over-curate their reporting to avoid accusations of being biased. These challenges can contribute to journalists being viewed as both producers and victims of polarisation; the latter might cause issue avoidance, in which journalists refrain from covering the forest issue altogether. Our conclusion is that the polarisation of the forest issue closes down rather than opens up for rethinking how forests are understood and acted upon.