Denmark’s status as one of Europe’s most stable and transparent democracies is not only linked to its high standard of living, but also to its strong and independent media environment. In the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, Denmark has for years ranked among the countries with the highest levels of public trust in the media. Surveys show that a significant proportion of Danes trust the news, with particularly strong confidence in public broadcasting institutions. This trust stems from a deeply rooted culture of transparency, the protection of editorial independence, and the systematic preservation of professional ethics.
The Danish Union of Journalists is one of the key pillars of this ecosystem. With more than 60 years of history, the organization brings together thousands of journalists, protects labor rights through collective agreements, defends the interests of digital media professionals, and oversees the implementation of ethical standards. At a time when artificial intelligence is becoming part of news production, the platform economy is reshaping media markets, and disinformation has turned into a global challenge, the union continues to develop new mechanisms to safeguard both professional quality and journalistic solidarity.
Kitabistan’s interviewee this time is the President of the Danish Union of Journalists, Allan Boye Thulstrup. We are pleased to present Mr. Allan Boye Thulstrup’s exclusive interview with Kitabistan.

- Mr. Allan Boye Thulstrup, first of all, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with Kitabistan. It is a great pleasure to have this conversation with you.

For some time now, we have been conducting interviews with the heads of the Journalist Associations in countries that rank highly in the international press freedom indices. Through this conversation with you today, our audiences have an opportunity to become familiar with the Danish model of press freedom.

Because Denmark is widely recognized for the significant progress it has made in ensuring press freedom, and it has achieved notable success in this field. Moreover, the Danish Union of Journalists considers the protection of press freedom to be one of its core missions. In this context, can we say that journalists in Denmark face no challenges at all? If challenges do exist, what are the main issues journalists encounter today? And what steps does the Union take to address them?

- Obviously, you will always have problems of different sizes and types. All I do think is that we have a really good level of press freedom in Denmark. So, the challenges that journalists face are maybe more in the field of working conditions. We don't have a large degree of state pressure on journalists. But we sometimes experience that journalists that cover specific topics can experience a large amount of online hate or online pressure from people that disagree with them.

So, that can be challenging and can also be quite hard to be certainly the center of attention from thousands of people that consider you stupid or say that the things you are reporting about are false. So, there is a growing pressure from people reading the journalism.

Then, of course, like I think media all over the globe, there are some challenges around the business models. How do you ensure that we have viable media? And as advertising revenue moves from traditional legacy media to the larger online platforms, the economy in the media houses has been put under pressure. And obviously, that also affects the working conditions of journalists - how much do they make, how much do they need to produce in a week or in a month. So, there are challenges for the working environment and challenges for press freedom, not necessarily from the state level, but from different levels.

- Well, as you are talking about the working conditions of the journalists, in the union's official website, it's also emphasized that openness and dialogue in society begin with the improving of the working conditions of media professionals. What direct connection do you see between the working conditions of the journalists and the democratization of society?

- Basically, you need to have proper working conditions for journalists in order to have working journalists. Because if it is not possible to make a living as a journalist, if it is only something you can do if you come from a family with a lot of money already, then you will only have certain voices being journalists and certain voices representing the values that you see in the media.

I think we need journalists to have diverse backgrounds in order to also be recognizable by the population. And also, in order to have different points of view when you select your sources, when you select your angles and your stories, you need to have a journalist with all different kinds of backgrounds. And if it's a profession that can only be filled out by either people from rich families or people who have so much, who need to be burned so much for journalism that they don't care about whether they eat or not, then we have too few people working in journalism.

So we need to have proper working conditions in order to ensure that we have all different kinds of perspectives represented in the media.

- After Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, disinformation and propaganda has become intense and systematic. Now, disinformation is no longer purely a national issue but has turned into a global problem.  In such a complex media environment, what concrete measures is the Union taking to address foreign information manipulation in the Danish media?

- Obviously, in Denmark, we have a lot of concern for disinformation and misinformation from Russia. We have a strategic geographical placement that makes us interesting. So, I know almost all newsrooms are working very systematically with verifying stories, verifying photos, trying to counter mis- and disinformation that reaches the public.

I think what we experienced in Denmark is that a large amount of the mis- and disinformation that we see is on the online platforms and not in the edited responsible media. So, I think the media are doing a good job, but the online platforms do not, I think, identify mis- and disinformation fast enough. They are not fast enough to remove it.

So, I think what we need to do is, and what we try to do, is try to inform the public that if they want to make sure that what they are reading and what they are seeing is verified and is actually double checked, then they need to use the edited media, the responsible editorial media, and not just what they see on online platforms. We also try to ensure that there is broad political support for independent public service media that is accessible to everybody in order to ensure that everybody does have access to verified proper journalism.

- I have recently conducted research on gender-based hate speech and discriminatory narratives in Azerbaijani media, which targets heavily women. This is a really sensitive issue because the stereotypes, stigmatizing, and labeling narratives about women are very widespread in Azerbaijani media. That's why, from this perspective, I would like to ask: do gender-based hate speech and stereotypes exist in Danish media? If such cases occur, what measures does the Union take to address and counter them?

- I think there is also gender bias and gender prejudice in Danish media. We have been working for many years to create more equality in the media. As a union, we support different initiatives to ensure gender equality. We still see that the number of journalists in news production, even though the total number of journalists, we have more women than men at this point, but the number of women journalists in newsrooms is still, I think, 38% at the moment. There's still a disparity.

Then we see also that the number of female sources compared to male sources. - It is a bit above the global average in Who Makes the News international surveys, but we still have only 31% total female sources. So, we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that we have the female point of view on the world represented in a proper way.

What our members experience, if they cover certain topics, the online hate that I talked about prior, seems to be much more prevalent when you are a female reporter than a male reporter. It seems to be that people tend to write much more to female reporters and call them all different kinds of things than they do to male reporters if they cover climate or immigration or COVID or some of the controversial issues that we have seen. It seems, for some reason, female reporters are much more exposed to online hate.

We try to see if we can help them, if we can do digital self-defense classes. I know some of the larger medias have dedicated teams helping if you know, you are going to write about controversial issues, trying to help the reporters, but also try to help the sources because sometimes it is also female sources that choose to be the face of a story. They are also really exposed to online hate.

There are different initiatives trying to help them, so we are not certainly in a situation where people are afraid to tell their story or are afraid to tell certain types of stories.

- The Union is also actively engaged in international debates on press freedom and I believe this is an important question to raise with you. At a time when democratic backsliding is visible in many parts of the world and press freedom is increasingly under pressure, based on your personal experience, what advice would you give to journalists working in such restricted environments on how to protect and uphold press freedom?

- That's a big question. I am on the Steering Committee of the European Federation of Journalists, and it is worrying how many of our member countries we see democratic backsliding. We see pressure on independent media, we see capture of media, we see large political pressure on the public broadcasters. So, I think some of the tools we got with the EMFA, the European Media Freedom Act, they only apply for the 27 EU countries, but my hope would be that they also, for the EU candidate countries, can be used to put some pressure on the governments in the EU candidate countries in order to ensure stable funding for public service, to ensure the importance of independent media and pluralistic media environment.

But obviously, these are intentions. So, in a daily, day-to-day journalistic life, it is not certain that you can use the European Media Freedom Act to ensure your working conditions. So, I think if you don't already have, in whatever country we are talking about, if you don't already have a strong association or union, I think that would be one step to unionize, to stand together.

Because, as in most of life's questions, the more you are, the stronger you are. So, if you manage to actually stand together 10 or 100 or 1,000 people, you will have a stronger voice and you have larger chances to protect yourself and to explain to the population why free and independent media is important. And I think once the population understands it, at some point, hopefully the government that is elected by these people will also understand that free and independent media is actually quite a critical part of a democracy.

If you have democratic backsliding and the institutions are being undermined by the government, I think the more light you can shed on that, the better. But I understand that that's enormously difficult if you are in a country and are afraid of the government or what the government might do. But I think shedding light on it and showing the rest of the world what is happening is one of the chances you have to actually maybe create some international pressure to make it different.

- Thanks a lot. And in the end, we have a traditional question. We always ask book recommendations. And I would like to address this traditional question to you. What book or books would you like to recommend to our readers and viewers to read?

- Oh, that is a good question. A book on media or democracy or?

- It does not matter, what kind of book you would like to recommend to read.

- Yeah. Well, when we are talking about democratic backsliding and such, I think Animal Farm by George Orwell, I think is surprisingly current in what we see in some countries at the moment.

- Thank you so much. Thank you for this insightful interview.

- Thank you. Have a nice day. Thank you.

Malak Hajiyeva

13.02.2026