Healthy mistrust or complacent confidence? Civic vigilance in the reporting by leading newspapers on nuclear waste disposal in Finland and France

Funding information Finnish Research Programme on Nuclear Waste Management (KYT2022), Grant/Award Number: Dnro KYT 13/2019; Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland “Collaborative remedies for fragmented societies – facilitating the collaborative turn in environmental decision‐making” (CORE), Grant/Award Number: Research project no. 313015; European Commission Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Individual Fellowships Abstract Trust and confidence have been identified as crucial for efforts at solving the conundrum of high‐level radioactive waste management (RWM). However, mistrust has its virtues, especially in the form of “civic vigilance”—healthy suspicion towards the powers that be. This article examines civic vigilance in the form of “watchdog journalism,” as practiced by the leading Finnish and French newspapers— Helsingin Sanomat (HS) and Le Monde (LM)—in their RWM reporting. Although both countries are forerunners in RWM, Finland constitutes a Nordic “high‐trust society” while France has been characterized as a “society of mistrust.” Employing the methods of frame analysis, key RWM‐related news frames were identified, consisting of varying combinations of confidence, skepticism, trust, and mistrust. LM's mistrust‐skepticism‐oriented framings reflect the classical watchdog role, in sharp contrast with the confidence oriented framings of HS, which tends to reproduce government and industry framings. Explanations for the observed differences can be sought in historically constituted political and media cultures, as well as national nuclear “regimes”. For further research, we suggest two alternative hypotheses concerning the