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We have all heard the debate. Traditional mainstream media is left-wing. Conservative and nationalist politicians must fight not only against left-wing politicians but also against the media and public service.
The same debate is being waged in several countries. In the US, Donald Trump has often singled out the media, or parts of the media, as a political opponent. And we have seen similar tendencies in France and the UK, for example. Large parts of the media are “politically correct” and they do everything they can to undermine the legitimacy of the new right.
At the same time, the media is sometimes accused of adapting to right-wing governments.
In Italy, the venerable RAI has been accused of adapting to the rule of Giorgia Meloni. Journalist Mario Manca wrote an article about this in the Italian Vanity Fair in 2024. “Has Rai really become TeleMeloni? Yes, and we have the proof,” was the headline of a sharp text about how the Italian state television too much reflected the political profile of the Meloni government.
In Sweden, which has also long had a strong public service television, a study was recently presented by a social democratic think tank in which one of the state television’s most important political debate programs, “Agenda”, is accused of giving significantly more space to right-wing politicians and opinion leaders than to left-wing ones.
The head of Katalys, Daniel Suhonen, writes in an article in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that Swedish state television has given in to a false narrative based on the idea that public service companies are dominated by the left and not by the right.
It must be said though that left-wing media is a topic that has long been discussed in Sweden. And in the discussion, critics of public service usually refer to a study from 2012 in which the party sympathies of Swedish journalists were reported. The survey showed that parties on the left, and above all the Green Party, had a clearly higher level of approval among journalists compared to the rest of the population. People also usually refer to a survey conducted every year by an organisation called the “Media Academy” which shows that Swedes who vote higher have lower trust in Swedish public service than left-wing voters.
But, says left-wing socialist Suhonen, this is nothing more than a false narrative. Suhonen even speaks of an “influence operation” from the right whose sole purpose is to push the public service, and the media in general, to the right. And that is precisely what they have now succeeded in doing.
The think tank has had the presence of people with political profiles in the current program quantified. And the result is said to be clear. “If we combine all categories (politicians, editorial writers and opinion leaders), writes Suhonen, conservative, bourgeois or liberal representatives get 70 percent of the speaking time, against the left’s 30 percent.” And this applies for a period of six months.
The Swedish public service has become regime media, writes Suhonen and of course means that the media has adapted to the right-wing government that has governed Sweden since 2022 with the support of the right-wing nationalist Sweden Democrats.
Critics of Suhonen’s thesis have highlighted two things.
Suhonen makes a big mistake when he counts the liberal media as part of the political right. The small party that calls itself the Liberals has indeed chosen to be part of a right-wing government, but the liberal media has always been skeptical of this and has recently become almost openly hostile to the right-wing government. Liberal media are not right-wing media, the critics say, but left-wing media.
Another problem that is highlighted is the lack of political initiatives from the left. While the right-wing government spews out new laws and reforms, the left mostly sits and watches. The only thing that unites the four left-wing parties is that they do not want to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats. That is why they also become uninteresting.
So, if the new political right (the conservatives, the nationalists) gets more space in Swedish state media – which seems to be the case – perhaps it is fundamentally because it is the right that has the political initiative.