Media coverage of the Finnish basic income experiment

Abstract

In 2017–2018 Finland conducted a basic income experiment. The randomly selected experiment group consisted of 2000 unemployed persons between 25 and 58 years. The group received a monthly payment of €560, unconditionally and without means testing. The main purpose of the experiment was to study the effects of the basic income on employment and well-being. The Finnish basic income experiment was exceptional in many ways and generated interest worldwide. Coverage of the Finnish experiment, in both the Finnish and international media, has been remarkable before, during and after the experiment. Social experiments cannot be implemented in a laboratory, but rather take place within communities, and their participants are individuals living their everyday lives. Social experiments occur in public; therefore, publicity is one characteristic of such experiments, and it is important to shed light on it. One way to study publicity is to study the media coverage of the issue. The news media, among other forms of mediated communication, has a significant role in the construction of reality (Couldry and Hepp, 2018). One way the news media can construct reality is by framing how an issue is approached. Frames can be described as ‘organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world’ (Reese, 2001: 11). In this chapter, I explore coverage of the Finnish basic income experiment in both the Finnish and international media. Specifically, I address the research question of how the Finnish and international media have framed the Finnish basic income experiment. To study media coverage, its characteristics, and prevailing perspectives, I used media framing analysis, concentrating on identification of media frames and frame-building. In this chapter, I first present media framing theory, and the theoretical and conceptual approaches to media frames, and the media framing process. Thereafter, sections on data and methods used in this study are presented. In