Rethinking Journalist-Politician Relations Using a Small State Framework: Mobile Generalists, Personal Closeness and Professional Distance

This article examines the relationship between journalists and politicians in Iceland. I illustrate how there are limitations in the existing journalist-source relations literature when it comes to studying journalist-politician relations in a small state like Iceland. Frameworks built on dichotomies between professional and non-professional settings need to be reconfigured to examine the Icelandic case. To do this, I introduce research from “small state studies”, focusing on multifunctionalism and personalism. My study is based on 93 interviews with Icelandic journalists and politicians. Findings illustrate that journalists and politicians in Iceland are mainly mobile and autonomous generalists. The journalist-politician relationship in Iceland can be defined in terms of deep social closeness and, at the same time, professional distance. This is in stark contrast to the professional closeness between journalists and politicians that much of the existing journalist-politician research from larger democracies has shown. Iceland’s social ecology can make impartiality and critical coverage difficult to achieve. The world’s smallest states are routinely absent in research on journalism and politics. My study adds the small state of Iceland to the knowledge base concerning journalist-politician relations and illustrates how existing frameworks need to be expanded to examine these types of relations in other small states.