Contested Conditions for Informal Actors in Intelligence Oversight: The Case of Swedish Journalism

Recent critical scholarship on intelligence emphasizes the role of informal actors in democratic oversight, encouraging increased attention to practices and struggles of accountability. Less probed are the fundamental conditions enabling the work of informal oversight actors and current struggles over such conditions. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of symbolic power and mobilizing insights from media sociology, this article turns to the case of Sweden, a top-ranking state in the press freedom index, to examine contemporary struggles surrounding the conditions for one critical informal actor in oversight: the media. Independent journalists can both scrutinize and legitimize intelligence work, thereby mediating between the intelligence services and the public. Journalists are however dependent on professional autonomy, access to information and epistemic trust to perform this key democratic function. Although Sweden represents a “least likely” case for declining conditions for journalistic work, the analysis identifies three interrelated sites of struggle shaping the conditions for journalistic oversight: struggles over press freedom in relation to national security; over source protection in the context of expanding state surveillance; and over epistemic trust driven by elite delegitimization of journalists. By examining public debates and legislation affecting journalistic scrutiny of intelligence and the implications for democratic accountability, the article speaks to broader debates on the current struggles of informal actors in democratic intelligence oversight – such as NGOs, civil society activists, academics, and journalists – in a context of rising geopolitical tensions and global democratic backsliding, generating increased external and internal pressures on liberal democratic states.