Mediatization and secularization: transformations of public service institutions – the case of Norway

Contesting public service institutions – the case of Norway

As a broadcaster, NRK defends its role as a public service institution dependent on broad confidence in it throughout Norwegian society. And we may presume that most of those who reacted against NRK’s instruction to remove the cross did so out of respect for traditions and attitudes that relate to the Church of Norway as another public institution. The church itself did not take action against NRK, and some of those who protested may well have been members of other religious communities. But a large majority of Norwegians still belong to the Church of Norway as active or passive members. NRK may have had support for its action even within the church but the removal of the cross – whatever its size – from the public space sparked a contest between two institutions that are both based in collective traditions with strong contemporary support in the population.

Three positions were identified in the debate over Sællmann’s cross in the first month following the incident (Skjerdal, 2014): First, to be professional as demanded by the leadership of NRK, defined as ‘neutrality’. This implies not dressing in a way that could be interpreted to favour a political or religious stance. The second, the identity position, challenges the requirement of neutrality, arguing that in a pluralist society one cannot ask people to hide personal identity. The third position, on cultural defence, came to dominate the debate on the Internet. From this position, NRK was charged with threatening Norwegian culture and Christian heritage by denying a staff member in its news section use of a symbol that has traditionally been a part of the country’s common cultural heritage.

Historically, the church and the broadcasting corporation both serve public functions in Norwegian society. NRK, like the original public service broadcasters in the other Nordic countries, sits at the top of what Trine Syvertsen et al. (2014) call the ‘Media Welfare State’. Even the Church of Norway and similar Lutheran majority churches in the other Nordic countries have been regarded as agents of social welfare (Bäckström et al., 2010). However, despite the key public roles the two institutions perform, NRK and the Church of Norway are today under pressure from a growing diversity and fragmentation in Norwegian society.

The three positions identified in the public discussions over Sællmann’s self-identification reflect aspects of this ongoing social and cultural differentiation. The professionalization, in this case at NRK, tells that the broadcaster has established itself as part of a relatively autonomous media domain. The identity position reflects contemporary individualization that makes religion a matter of personal choice and expression. The position of cultural defence, however, reminds us that there are counterforces to cultural and social differentiation in Norway.

These aspects of the differentiation of society are central to secularization. This is the process where main religious institutions lose authority and power because the tasks and functions that they used to perform are dispersed – taken over by other institutions (Bruce, 2011). Secularization still provides a valid sociological perspective on structural changes in late-modern societies (Norris and Inglehart, 2004), despite scholarly arguments for a de-privatization (Casanova, 1994) and the resurgence (Berger, 1999) of religion, and even for a ‘post-secular’ society where religious communities make their challenging presence felt in the public realm (Habermas, 2006). In Norway, with its dominant Lutheran tradition, secularization is basically about the changing role of the national church, as a result of more diverse expressions of belief and disbelief among people as well as increasing contestation of the Christian traditions embodied by the church.

The anchor’s cross, then, triggered a discussion of these transformations. However, the main broadcasting institution Sællmann represents is itself undergoing change. NRK’s fight for professionalization and institutional position is part of the mediatization of culture and society (Hjarvard, 2013). Thus, the case of the cross touches on secularization as well as mediatization. Norway makes an accessible case to observe these transformations since the country is quite small and homogeneous, with fairly centralized public institutions.

Forty years of secularization and mediatization

Norway offers an exemplary case of the rise of a fully mediatized society within a period of some 40 years. The concept of mediatization ‘tries to capture long-term interrelation processes between media change on one hand and social and cultural change on the other’ (Hepp et al., 2010: 223). As such long-term socio-cultural changes are deep and lasting and take the character of transformations (Lundby, 2014a). Mediatization is a process over time (Hepp, 2013; Hjarvard, 2013; Lundby, 2009b, 2014b). Hence, mediatization has a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ within which the transformation takes place.

While the ‘after’ is considered to be the contemporary situation, how to define and find the ‘before’ is a contested issue (Lundby, 2014a: 23–25). When did mediatization begin? Friedrich Krotz argues that mediatization goes back to the inception of humankind when humans began to use tools as media in communication. In that sense, mediatization is a basic social and cultural process. However, the historical development of media development changes the character of the mediatization (Krotz, 2009). Stig Hjarvard (2013) argues that mediatization in its emerged form is only to be found in modern, highly industrialized societies of the late 20th century. Krotz also has a focus on cultural and social change in modern societies. However, while he looks for transforming communication processes (Krotz, 2014), Hjarvard goes for institutional transformations (Hjarvard, 2013: 23–27; 2014). In this essay about historical institutional change, I lean towards Hjarvard.

Mediatization research has been challenged on its explanation of change over time. Deacon and Stanyer (2014) argue that ‘much mediatization research depends on a presumption rather than a demonstration of historical change’ (p. 1037). Although Deacon and Stanyer miss the broader change perspectives of mediatization research, they have reasons to ask for more explicit historic analyses (Hepp et al., 2010: 223; Hepp et al., 2015). This essay is a modest contribution to their request.

My case goes back to the early 1970s. I then wrote a thesis on the presentation of religion on radio and television in four of the Nordic countries (Lundby, 1974) to explore the sociological hypothesis of the increasing secularization of Scandinavian societies and the possible impact of radio and television on this process. At that moment, Norway was very much at the start of the structural mediatization of broadcasting, compared to Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Early 1970s broadcasting in Norway meant one radio channel and one television channel within the monopoly of the state-owned NRK. Television had only been introduced as late as 1960. Norway was the last country in Europe alongside Albania to give the population access to television. In Denmark and Sweden, as well, the main public service broadcaster was in a dominant position by the early 1970s, although with more channels within the same national corporation. Finland was the exception at that time, with a commercial company alongside the state controlled Finish Broadcasting Company (YLE). This dominance of public service broadcasters gave me reason to assume that the different phases of secularization in the Nordic countries would be mirrored through programmes on church and religion in the national radio and television outlets.

I considered secularization to become visible in the regulations and norms at work in the corporations as well as in the programming schedule, in three distinct ways. First, in the privatization of religion, that is, that religion was treated as belonging to the private domain along with family, leisure and consumption, cut-off from driving economic and political processes in society. The second aspect of secularization I looked for was signs of increasing religious and ideological pluralism. Finally, as the classic understanding of secularization implies weakening of the main religious institution in society, I looked at how the majority churches as well as anti-church groups were trying to strengthen their positions within the programme schedules of the broadcasters.

As seen through thematic programmes on church and religion, Sweden came out as the most secularized Nordic country in 1972 followed by Denmark. Norway and Finland turned out to be less secularized according to my findings. Different aspects of secularization were stressed in the four countries. The difference between Sweden and Norway was mostly due to the degree of pluralism and the privatization of religion in the programmes.

Mediatization was not part of my analysis at the beginning of the 1970s, as that concept was not yet coined and the media situation was so stable. However, since the 1980s, the structural changes or transformations that were later termed mediatization took shape in the Nordic countries (Hjarvard, 2013; Lundby, 2009a, 2014a). In Norway media, historians denote the structural changes in the media system from 1980 onwards as ‘the great sloughing’ of the skin of the past (Bastiansen and Dahl, 2008). Economic and political de-regulation and liberalization, globalization and immigration, and individualization and cultural diversity have been driving forces of the structural changes in northern Europe since the 1970s. Secularization and mediatization were involved in these overall transformations and are intertwined with each other.

Church and media may interact and strengthen each other, for example, to sacralize media events or when the church plays a consoling role in mediatized rituals at national tragedies. However, when religious institutions lose authority, media may gain authority. The media contribute to this loss of religious authority in society. Individual forms of religiosity and spirituality may flourish despite secularization on the institutional level. And there may be a more visible coverage of issues on religion in public media despite expanding secularization, due to growing societal tension and conflict over religion.

Mediatization in this setting implies that the media are reformatting messages that used to be covered by loyalty to religious institutions. The reformatting by media institutions works back on religious institutions, thus strengthening secularization. On the other side, secularization gives space for mediatization, as the media may define reality and provide ritual and community that used to be performed by religious institutions (Hjarvard, 2013: 79–81).

In Norway, since the 1970s, the combined processes of secularization and mediatization have placed NRK and the Church of Norway under parallel processes of transformation. As public service institutions they both have had to redefine their relations to society throughout the last 40 years. They have both changed from national institutions that dominated their place in the public sphere, and where NRK gave strong legitimacy to the church through its programming. They both changed into institutions that, in order to maintain their legitimacy, have had to cater for their users in a much more diverse and individualized way. Hence, both have had to operate more on market terms. For the church, the media become an important arena. The church increasingly has had to play with the mediatization of religion in order to get its voice heard in the contemporary pluralized public sphere. The tensions over the anchor’s cross at the turn of 2014 indicate a situation that has been shaped by mediatization as well as by secularization. Let us look into some of the changes in the mediatization of religion in Norway by the national broadcaster through the 40 years since the beginning of the 1970s.

Mediatization of religion at a low point

In the early 1970s, there was no significant mediatization of religion within the broadcast output of NRK. The coverage of religion mainly referred to the hegemonic position of the Church of Norway (Lundby, 1985: 187–188). Because of the monopoly on radio and television at that time, I trusted that the programmes on church and religion would mirror the actual level and form of secularization in society. This was a mistaken approach as media studies have well documented that the programming is always edited and constructed.

In 1972, the year I collected my data, there was still such a respect in NRK towards the Christian tradition carried by the Church of Norway that very little media-adapted editing was applied to ‘religious programmes’, although there was nothing in NRK’s constitution that formally required such loyalty. Representatives of the church were to a great extent invited to preach on their own terms and in their own format. The church had a strong and direct influence on the content of church services and devotions. Stories on church and religion in radio and television magazine programmes were also quite uncritical, although some began to come through in the wake of the youth radicalization that began in the 1970s. Critical voices against the church-based religion were muted in the year I undertook my data collection, though I should note that I did not study news programmes, only topics in themed programmes on religion.

If NRK did not really format and transform religion through their editorial practice at that time, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation did. Their morning devotions on the radio in the early 1970s were transformed away from a typical church style to a radio-friendly approach, discussing general human issues more than specific religious topics. They also did experiments with new formats in the religious programming in television. So, if NRK by 1972 showed little or no mediatization of religion, Swedish public service broadcasting had embarked on a mediatization route that was only later taken up by NRK.

Mediatization processes

In 1977, a few years after my thesis, the Norwegian sociologist Gudmund Hernes published the first version of his essay on the ‘media-twisted’ or ‘media-distorted’ society, that he elaborated on in the following year (Hernes, 1978). His article is acknowledged as ground-breaking on the mechanisms operating in mediatization, first by Kent Asp (1990), later by Stig Hjarvard (2013: 8–9). Hernes published his ideas on the media-twisting mechanisms 2 years ahead of the American pioneering work on ‘media logic’ (Altheide and Snow, 1979) which became a key term in mediatization research, although also a criticized one (Lundby, 2014a: 28). Hernes pointed to the tendencies in the media to simplify the issues they were covering, by taking them to extremes, polarizing and intensifying the cases, giving complex and abstract information through simple examples and by focusing on persons rather than issues. He regarded these techniques as twisting or distorting the issues under examination by the media.

Hernes’ work was an early contribution to the study of the impact of the emerging mass media on the central institutions that shape social life conditions and their interrelations: school, organizations, political parties, public bureaucracies, corporations and so on. He engaged with the expansion of radio and television in Norway towards the end of the 1970s, television in particular. However, his argument was general: drawing upon Herbert Simon’s (1971) distinction, Hernes characterized Norway as in transition from an ‘information-poor’ to an ‘information-rich’ society. This information-poor society was selective in terms of the values that were communicated, as school and church socialized youth into the Christian tradition and few alternative, critical voices came through. In contrast, the information-rich society becomes value pluralistic. Greater diversity is supported through the media, with a more critical journalism emerging (in the press as well), expanded airtime in broadcasting and the visibility of a variety of voices through television.

With more and more media material available, media users have themselves to be selective as there is a limited capacity for what one can grasp in the 24 hours of the day. The overflow of material in the information-rich society creates a deficit in attention. Journalists and other media producers will draw upon various media-twisting techniques to attract attention and get the audience to read, to listen to or view their stories. Norway was neither really ‘information-poor’ nor really an ‘information-rich’ country by 1977 at the time of his writing, but Gudmund Hernes saw that the times were changing. With an eye to this essay’s focus on mediatization of religion, his comparison of bible stories taught in schools in information-poor societies with popular films in the media-rich setting is worth citing: ‘The Biblical narrative cannot compare with ‘Ben Hur’, and the teacher of religion cannot compare with Charlton Heston’ (Hernes, 1978: 187, translated).

Transformations of the two Norwegian institutions

Over the last 40 years, broadcasting in Norway has been transformed in terms of technology, production and output, audience choices and commercialization. NRK has, in line with other public service corporations, moved from one-to-many broadcasting to a variety of digital applications and more interaction with viewers and listeners. In competition with other media, NRK tries to be sensitive to its users. The original public service mission has come under pressure from a stronger media professionalism and market orientation, which strengthen the pluralism in output and, inter alia, a greater relativism towards religion.

Norway was a latecomer to the multi-channel broadcasting world compared to most other Western countries. NRK’s monopoly started to break up in 1982 with some trial concessions to a few satellite channels as well as to community broadcasting. The same year the second nationwide radio channel was introduced – within NRK. Full-scale competition from commercial radio was not in place until 1993. Alternative television channels in Norwegian challenged NRK from 1987, but they had to transmit from London via satellite. A second commercial public service television channel was launched in 1992. Television in Norway was fully digitized from 2009. At the beginning of 2014, Norwegian television viewers had 23 nationwide TV channels to choose among. Despite strong competition from the other television companies NRK in 2014 still held the highest market share in the population as total, but had lost this position to new channels among young viewers. However, the growing competition, commercialization and transformation of the broadcasting structure throughout the 40 years have strengthened the kind of mediatization processes that Gudmund Hernes pointed out.

The Church of Norway as a (former) dominant religious institution has undergone a similar transformation as part of the changes of culture and society in Norway. In the early 1970s, more than 90% of all Norwegians belonged to the Church of Norway. There were no Muslims, few Catholics and few outside any faith community, although the Norwegian Humanist Association at that time was gaining some support through its active encouragement of people to leave the established state church. Today, a large majority of the population – three in four Norwegians – are still members of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Norway. However, in the most urbanized areas with individualized youth and a large share of immigrants, less than half the population belong to the Church of Norway. One in 10 are members of organized faith or secular life stance communities outside the Church of Norway, but an even larger and growing share of the population, around 15% by 2013, do not belong to any such group. Despite their growing number, Christians outside the Church of Norway (in particular, immigrant Catholics) still outnumber Muslims. The strong Humanist association as well as a growing Muslim influence contributes to sharper debates in the Norwegian public sphere, not least over the role of Islam.

The Evangelical-Lutheran foundation in the Norwegian Constitution was removed in 2012. However, at the same time the Church of Norway was written into the constitution as an institution that ‘will remain the Established Church of Norway and will as such be supported by the State’. The church has had to build its own communication resources but these are very modest compared to most other institutions. The mediatization of the church is rather forced upon it by the secular media. However, the Church of Norway continues as a dominant, although more contested institution, still with strong links to NRK.

As a public broadcaster in the tradition of the BBC (cf. Wolfe, 1984), NRK has since its early days transmitted church services every Sunday and morning devotions during weekdays with a Christian perspective. In 2014, a significant segment of Norwegians – up to 10% of the adult population – listen to the worship that is transmitted on NRK radio or to morning devotions on the same channel. NRK has slightly formatted – that is, mediatized – these programmes on media-specific terms, but minsters are still invited to preach on the radio and sometimes on television. In 2014, NRK organized and transmitted live 60 hours of continuous ‘slow-TV’ with choirs from all over the country singing through 899 psalms in the new hymnbook of the Church of Norway.

There is criticism over this presence of the Christian majority religion on NRK. The broadcaster makes clear that it is their editorial decision and not due to church influence, but because so many listeners and viewers want them that NRK carries such ‘religious programmes’. However, behind this surface, there is an emerging tension due to continued secularization and mediatization.

Expanding mediatization of religion

Reactions from viewers and within NRK towards the anchor wearing a cross came on the news section of NRK’s programming. The criticism against her appearance may be seen as a reaction to the strong Christian tradition in Norway, but may also resonate with debates on the use of the hijab within the still small but growing Muslim population. While Gudmund Hernes (1978) could cite James Coleman (1971: 118), that the degree of democratic participation may be undermined by mass media, and in particular television, because people are made into observers not active participants – this is no longer the situation in 2014. People now participate in debate through social media, commenting upon what is offered in radio and television and contributing to mediatization processes.

Today, I would hesitate to draw conclusions about the level of secularization based on an analysis of programming in national broadcasting. Secularization and mediatization appear in 2014 as clearly intertwined processes. The aspects of secularization that I pointed to in 1974 may still be valid, namely, privatization of religion, pluralism and contests over the role of the dominant church. However, these three processes have gradually through the 40 years become more dependent on the role and power of the media. Secularization is to a growing extent shaped through mediatization. The news anchor wearing her cross happened to demonstrate the transforming power of the ongoing differentiation of societal values. Professionalized, central broadcasting institutions have the capacity to change communication over religion through their formatting of content. In this case the NRK was caught in a balancing act between allowing for a range of individual identity expressions over religion while at the same time being mindful of cultural-religious traditions that are embedded in the church and remain significant for large segments of the population. The issue was resolved by the secular institution (the NRK) and not the religious institution (the Church of Norway). It is a small indication of the declining authority of the latter and the rising power of the former in the age of mediatization.