They are called ‘alternative media’. Alternatives to what? To the truth? To reality? Or merely to the reality that the state-funded and state-authorised gatekeepers have agreed that we ought to share?
There are words that describe reality.
And then there are words that place people within it.
‘Alternative media’ belongs to the latter category.
The term sounds innocuous. Almost technical. But it performs a small piece of political work every time it is used.
First, the normal is established.
Then the alternative is established.
NRK, VG, Aftenposten, Dagbladet and the rest of the editor-controlled mainstream are ‘the media’.
Document, podcasts, independent online newspapers, Substack writers, YouTube channels and others outside the old gate become ‘alternative media’.
Alternatives to what?
That question is almost never asked.
For if ‘alternative’ means an alternative to the largest media organisations, the designation is banal. But if the word gradually comes to mean an alternative to reliable information, an alternative to reality, an alternative to democracy, the choice of words has already decided the matter before the reader has had time to examine the content.
It is framing in its purest form.
And that is precisely why we ought to start calling them something much simpler:
Free media.
‘The common news stream’
The Norwegian Media Authority (Medietilsynet) has now presented developments in Norwegians’ news habits as a potential problem for democracy and emergency preparedness.
Four out of ten Norwegians say in the Reuters Digital News Report 2026 that they sometimes or often avoid news. That is nine percentage points more than the previous year. At the same time, 53 per cent say that they trust news in general.
This ought to prompt one obvious question:
What is it about the news product that causes so many customers to walk out of the shop?
But the language of the authorities is rapidly moving in another direction.
The Norwegian Media Authority has expressed concern about people who find themselves outside a ‘common public sphere’, and links absence from editor-controlled media to polarisation, security and a possible risk of radicalisation. The Authority also explicitly asks what happens when ‘social and alternative media’ increasingly set the premises for the information to which people are exposed.
Read that wording once more.
Not a news stream.
The common news stream.
There lies the entire problem, wrapped up in three friendly words.
For why should a democracy have one common news stream?
We need a common factual basis where facts can actually be established. We need functioning channels for information from the authorities when floods come, the mobile network breaks down or hostile forces approach our borders.
But this is something different from the notion that the population should orient itself through the same interpretative news stream in order to maintain democratic cohesion.
Democracy was invented because people do not agree about reality.
Politics exists precisely because facts must be interpreted, interests collide, causes are debated and power is challenged.
If everyone were already expected to share the authorities’ preferred view of reality, we would scarcely need democracy.
Then we would need information.
And a Ministry of Information.
The news avoider
The term ‘news avoider’ is also interesting.
The Norwegian Media Authority uses the term for people who do not engage with news through traditional channels. At the same time, the Authority’s own figures show that the trend particularly concerns younger people, while social media, podcasts and other digital forms of information are growing.
But many of these people are clearly not avoiding information.
They are avoiding the product.
The difference is so great that one might imagine a media authority would notice it.
A man who stops eating at Peppes and starts making pizza at home is not a ‘food avoider’.
A woman who cancels her Aftenposten subscription and starts listening to three-hour podcast conversations with historians, economists and researchers is not necessarily a ‘news avoider’.
She has merely changed supplier.
Yet there is a subtle paternalistic idea embedded in this terminology:
If you do not consume information through the ‘right’ institutions, you are on the outside.
And whoever is on the outside becomes a problem to be studied.
Soon, no doubt, we shall have a directorate for the reintegration of lapsed Dagsrevyen viewers.
Working title:
NAV – News Addicts’ Guidance Service.
Perhaps people are simply full.
The modern 24-hour news cycle has done something to journalism that is rarely discussed.
News used to have a beginning and an end.
Dagsrevyen began as regular television news in 1958, became a daily broadcast in 1967, and for several decades began at 7.30 p.m., before NRK moved it to 7 p.m. because of competition from TV 2 in 1992.
You watched the news.
Then the news was over.
The world admittedly continued to exist, but the newsroom did not knock on your door every seven minutes to tell you that the Foreign Minister had ‘reacted’.
There were newspapers with strong political profiles. The Labour press, bourgeois newspapers, Christian newspapers and local publications stood more clearly for something. The reader often knew whom he had before him.
This was no political Garden of Eden. The party press had its own weaknesses and biases.
But diversity at least meant different editorial environments with visible standpoints.
Today, we have something else:
News 24 hours a day.
Seven days a week.
365 days a year.
The front page must be filled.
The push notification must be sent.
The live feed must live.
The commentator must comment on the commentator’s comment.
A person opens his phone at 07.13 and learns that a politician ‘hits back’.
At 08.04 another ‘reacts’.
At 09.32 ‘the expert is clear’.
At 11.07 ‘the statement causes a stir’.
At 13.14 ‘the minister responds’.
At 15.48 ‘the comments section erupts’.
And at 7 p.m., Dagsrevyen comes along and tells you the same thing all over again.
It is not necessarily public enlightenment.
Sometimes it is the industrial production of attention.
The news factory
The round-the-clock machine requires enormous quantities of raw material.
This is where the news agencies come in. NTB itself states that the agency supplies editorial content to nearly 200 Norwegian media outlets and continuously monitors the news picture.
This is not a criticism of NTB. A news agency is useful, and common basic information can save small newsrooms enormous resources.
But the structure has an obvious bias.
When hundreds of newsrooms receive the same basic material, follow the same news events, see the same press releases, monitor the same social media and compete for the same digital moment, homogenisation of the agenda can easily arise.
A hundred newspapers can therefore give the impression of a hundred independent voices while the same fifteen stories move through the entire system.
The headline changes.
The picture is replaced.
The introduction is rewritten.
Reality has still passed through the same funnel.
This is what makes modern media diversity paradoxical:
Never has Norway had more publishing platforms.
Never has information travelled faster.
But speed is not diversity.
The number of logos is not necessarily the number of perspectives.
The great irony of press subsidies
Then the state enters as the benefactor of diversity.
Production subsidies were introduced in 1969 because of fears about the death of newspapers and local monopolies. Between 1950 and 1969, around 40 Norwegian newspaper titles had disappeared. The objective was explicitly formulated as maintaining a ‘differentiated daily press’.
That was an understandable objective.
And even today, the legislation states that production subsidies are intended to promote a diversity of free and independent editor-controlled media, particularly smaller media outlets and alternatives to the leading players. The scheme is to be administered according to objective and transparent criteria.
That must be emphasised, otherwise the criticism becomes too simplistic:
Press subsidies are not evidence of political obedience. Media outlets far removed from the political mainstream can also qualify for support.
But that does not mean that the question of principle disappears:
What happens to a press when more and more of its financial framework is shaped by the state that the press is supposed to scrutinise?
No Minister of Culture needs to telephone an editor.
No one needs to send the day’s editorial from the ministry.
Dependence works far more subtly than that.
It creates institutions.
Criteria.
Applications.
Reporting.
Schemes.
Expectations.
And after a few decades, both sides may have forgotten that there is anything strange about the relationship at all.
In the language of satire, ‘press subsidies’ may therefore quite properly be called obedience subsidies – not because every subsidised editor is obedient, but because a free society ought to tolerate the question of how close the Fourth Estate should stand to the first three.
When diversity became consensus
The great irony is that the state justifies its media policy in terms of diversity, while the Norwegian Media Authority becomes concerned when citizens actually practise that diversity.
For what are social media, podcasts and free online media other than the most explosive democratisation of publishing power since the introduction of the printing press?
Previously, you had to own a printing press.
Then you had to own a television channel.
Then you had to own the distribution network.
Today, you need a microphone.
A camera.
A server.
And an argument good enough for people voluntarily to listen to you.
The gatekeeper has lost the key.
This is what the legacy media still have not entirely understood.
They are not merely competing with other newsrooms.
They are competing directly with reality.
When a politician gives a speech, the public can experience the entire speech.
When a report is published, the public can open the report.
When NRK shows seven seconds of an interview, the viewer can find the remaining 58 minutes.
When a journalist tells people what Donald Trump, the EU, a researcher or a demonstrator ‘really meant’, people can hear for themselves what the person said.
It is a revolution.
The intermediary has lost its monopoly on context.
And that creates cognitive dissonance.
The problem arises when experienced reality and mediated reality drift apart.
People can tolerate this for a while.
Then the friction begins to become noticeable.
If the newspaper says that the economy is doing well while the household experiences the opposite, friction arises.
If integration is portrayed as successful while the local community experiences problems that the newsroom rarely describes, friction arises.
If a politician is described as popular while the people around the dinner table do not know a single person who likes him, friction arises.
If a political problem is always explained through the same five moral categories while alternative causal explanations consistently remain outside the frame, friction arises.
Eventually, the cognitive dissonance becomes greater than the media outlet’s authority.
Then the most dangerous thing that can happen to a media outlet occurs:
The reader does not necessarily lose interest.
He stops believing you.
The Reuters Institute has found that 53 per cent of Norwegians in 2026 say that they trust most news most of the time. That is a high figure internationally, but at the same time means that trust is far from universal. And 40 per cent say that they sometimes or often actively avoid news.
That ought to be treated as a market and credibility problem.
Not as disobedience among the population.
The Reality Authority
But the language of the Norwegian Media Authority is moving dangerously close to the notion that a common understanding of reality is itself a public good.
This is where the warning light should start flashing.
Not because total preparedness is unimportant.
Of course the authorities must be able to reach the population with credible information during war, disasters and serious incidents. Total Defence Year 2026 has precisely the aim of strengthening Norway’s ability to deal with security-policy crises and war.
But the authorities’ credibility during a crisis cannot be built by worrying about the population reading the ‘wrong’ media in peacetime.
It is built through one thing:
The authorities telling the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable.
The trust needed during war is earned before the war.
It cannot be regulated into existence.
It cannot be subsidised into existence.
And it most certainly cannot be censored into existence.
‘Alternative media’
We should therefore stop accepting the premise contained in the very term.
Alternative media?
An alternative to NRK?
Yes.
An alternative to VG?
Hopefully.
An alternative to the state-subsidised media consensus?
Absolutely.
An alternative to the truth?
That must be decided in the same way as for NRK, Aftenposten and everyone else:
By examining what they actually publish.
A media outlet does not become truthful because it is old.
It does not become credible because it receives public funding.
It does not become disreputable because it originated on the internet.
And a journalistic claim does not become more accurate because fifteen newsrooms published the same NTB dispatch.
Truth has no company registration number.
Genuine democratic preparedness
A robust democracy does not need citizens who receive the same information.
It needs citizens who can assess different information.
It needs people who compare.
Read primary sources.
Seek out counterarguments.
Expose manipulation even when the manipulation comes from their own side.
It needs NRK.
It needs VG.
It needs the local newspapers.
It needs Document.
It needs the podcasts.
It needs the irritating man with a camera who asks the question that all the accredited journalists declined to ask.
It even needs bad media.
For democracy’s answer to bad media is better media. Not fewer media.
The gatekeeper is dead
This is what the Norwegian Media Authority and the old media order must understand.
The public is not going back to 1987.
There will be no return to 7.30 p.m., Dagsrevyen and a population discussing the same four stories around the coffee machine the following morning.
That world is gone.
The smartphone killed it.
The podcast buried it.
Social media threw earth onto the grave.
And AI is going to erect the headstone.
The attempt to recreate a single ‘common news stream’ will therefore not restore trust.
It will only deepen the mistrust.
Because people notice when institutions miss their old control.
They notice it in the words.
‘Alternative media’.
‘News avoiders’.
‘Common public sphere.’
‘Resilience’.
‘Disinformation’.
Each individual term can be legitimate.
But taken together, they can also form a paternalistic grammar in which the citizen who trusts the authorities occupies the centre, while the disobedient consumer of information is gradually pushed towards the margins.
That is a dangerous road.
Perhaps it is the Norwegian Media Authority that needs to reconnect.
The Norwegian Media Authority worries about people who disconnect from the news stream.
Perhaps the Authority ought to try asking the opposite question:
Why has the news stream disconnected from the people?
Why do some experience it as irrelevant?
Why do some experience it as lacking credibility?
Why do young people spend three hours listening to a podcast while they cannot bear three minutes of a television debate?
Why do they seek out long conversations when the traditional media serve increasingly shorter clips?
Why do they go to primary sources?
Why do they read foreign media?
Why do free media emerge?
The answer may be uncomfortable.
Perhaps the public does not need more media education.
Perhaps the media need more contact with the public.
For when people turn their backs on ‘the common news stream’, it is not necessarily democracy in which they have lost confidence.
It may be the directors.
And perhaps the most democratic thing they can do is precisely to walk out of the auditorium and find another performance.
They are not news avoiders.
They are gatekeeper avoiders.
And the so-called alternative media are not alternatives to reality.
They are alternative routes to it.