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Public service media has long been an object of criticism for conservatives, in virtually every European country. In just the last month, this conflict has accelerated in several countries in Europe, most notably Britain, but also Sweden.
In Sweden, the unusually prominent role and status of public service broadcasters SVT (Swedish Television) and Sveriges Radio (Radio Sweden) has caused this common polarisation to become especially severe. The last month has been very damaging to the country’s public service media, in particular SVT, which stems from the scandal where the British public service broadcaster BBC aired a “Panorama” documentary focusing on the 2020 American presidential election.
The BBC’s Trump edit
In this documentary, Donald Trump’s speech in Washington DC on January 6th 2021, the day of the confirmation of the election results two months prior, was edited to present the president as inciting violence and unrest, and framed as the ultimate reason pro-Trump protesters violated the boundaries of the Capitol. The incident quickly became a global headline, and much debate was had around the methods and culture of Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ movement. They were accused of disrespecting the democratic process, and of endangering the lives of not just Democratic politicians, but also Republican ones who adhered to the order.
In the documentary, which was aired just weeks prior to the 2024 presidential election which Donald Trump came out ahead in, his speech to his followers in Washington DC was cut and spliced to give the impression that Trump directly ordered his followers to disrupt the confirmation process in the Capitol. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and we fight like hell,” was the order of words presented by the BBC; the part that was omitted was that Trump actually followed the first sentence with “and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women”. The “fight like hell” part was uttered nearly an hour later, and was, according to the BBC critics, a figure of speech and not an incitement of literal violence.
That this edit was criticised internally by the BBC’s ethics board as an “error of judgement” and admitted as misleading was only made public a year later, when a memo of the corporation’s other journalistic ethic missteps was leaked. The resulting scandal was quickly picked up by the United Kingdom’s right-leaning media, and led to the departure of two BBC chiefs, the director-general and the head of news. The context worth pointing out here is that it was not only the Trump edit that culminated in this rolling of heads, but a number of other failures as well, or “errors of judgement”, if you will.
This was hardly the first time the BBC has come under fire for inaccurate representations of Donald Trump. That the consequences were fairly severe this time likely has to do with the mounting pressure the corporation has been under for many years now. The growth of conservatism and nationalism worldwide has made the BBC’s political biases very obvious to the larger audiences, and the British broadcaster has generally been described as institutionally progressive, and more often than not embracing radical woke perspectives in its news stories and its fictional media productions. The patience of the public at large who identified these ideological tendencies is bound to run out at some point, and this was recognised by the BBC in this instance. There was no way they could get away with not only making a potentially libellous edit and splicing of Donald Trump’s speech around such a controversial incident, but also admitting fault internally without disclosing this to the public. The leaked memo revealed corruption and a failure to live up to their own standards that was impossible to sweep under the rug.
The whipping of the BBC set the wheels in motion for critics of biased public service media in other countries, such as Sweden.
SVT under siege
The Swedish public service broadcasters, organisationally divided into two separate entities for television and radio respectively (there is a third entity as well, which often manages to escape acknowledgement due to its small size and limited scope), has been under fire for a very long time. Already in the 1970s they were the object of harsh criticism from the then marginalised but simultaneously nascent right wing, for ideologically left-wing biases. The total monopolisation of television and radio that SVT and Radio Sweden enjoyed up until the 1990s was also a frequent point of criticism, as this largely prevented other voices from entering the mainstream media sphere.
This monopoly, maintained by the leading political powers of the day, together with the 20th-century homogeneity of Sweden, built a deep institutional trust in public service in the population. The lack of alternatives and the corporatist nature of Sweden society at this time created an unusually strong relationship between the people and the state media that has been compared by outsiders – perhaps hyperbolically but nonetheless profoundly – to fascism, such as by the British journalist Roland Huntford who used such terms already in 1971 to describe the social structures of Sweden. The key takeaway here is that public service media in Sweden stands perhaps unusually strong, even by European standards.
Today SVT and Radio Sweden enjoy still staggering numbers in confidence polling. Distrusters are concentrated on the right wing, especially among conservative and nationalist Sweden Democratic voters, but are also found evenly scattered across the centre-right. Politically, this polarisation has created the impression that the left wing has come to take ownership of public service, defending it in the public debate as though it theirs. This has the effect of confirming the suspicions from right-wing critics, who are in turn increasingly galvanised against tax-funded media.
Thus, moderate voices on the issue of public service media in Sweden are rare. From the right-wing grassroots, there is a resounding complete abolitionism that dominates. On the left, there is instead an irrationally overprotective tendency, and both extremes are practically radicalising each other. Thus, when the BBC’s Trump edit scandal took the world by storm, the right wing was quick to mobilise. The last few weeks have seen the debate rage on social media and in official party communications like never before.
SVT’s own Trump blunder
Portrayed as one of the most egregious instances of left-wing bias in Swedish public service media, the BBC was not alone in airing documentaries about president Donald Trump without due attention to objectivity. SVT was quickly found to have made the exact same mistake the BBC did, where a compromising edit of Trump’s January 6th speech was on full display in a trailer video for a British documentary (a different documentary than the BBC’s “Panorama” one, for clarity) the channel had aired during 2024.
Swedish public service was not as quick as the BBC to admit fault, at least not openly. The channel and its defenders among politicians and other media, defied the criticism with one particularly bold argument; the Trump edit, they argued, did not betray the chain of events on January 6th, and thus there was no error. Implicit in this defence is the view that Donald Trump supported violence and unrest, even though he verbally called for peaceful protest – a very common judgement of character of Donald Trump in Swedish media and in the Swedish public.
This shifted the debate to once again open up the wounds of January 6th, to what actually had transpired that day, and what the machinations of Donald Trump truly were. This testifies to the very negative image that Trump and the MAGA movement has in Sweden, which is more often than not automatically ascribed destructive and undemocratic ambitions. To say the least, nuance on the topic of nationalism and conservatism, especially in the United States, is hard to come by in the Swedish press.
Criticism of public service, and even non-state affiliated media in Sweden, regarding portrayals of Donald Trump date back to when Trump first announced his presidential campaign in 2015. The spliced January 6th speech is not the first time Trump has been edited for a Swedish audience, which obviously sometimes has to be done in the interest of the viewers’ and readers’ time. But in every such action, there is an ethical responsibility to make sure the presentation does not give a false impression.
The prevailing attitude on the right is that Swedish media had failed to live up to these expectations. With the BBC scandal, there was ‘blood in the water’, and alleged dishonest Trump portrayals were dug up from across the board. The Swedish news bureau TT, which syndicates news reports to every major Swedish newspaper, was for example revealed to have reproduced the same inaccurate version of the January 6th speech in all its articles covering the topic since 2021 – which had then been republished in just about all major Swedish newspapers. For a Swedish audience, that Donald Trump was directly inciting violence towards the Capitol is almost indisputable, since that is practically the only story they were exposed to in national media.
Private media systematically pushing one particular agenda is regrettable, but it is also par for the course. Tax-funded media like SVT and Radio Sweden, who claim to be neutral and objective broadcasters, were understandably subject to calls for censure by right-wing politicians following the BBC-esque scandal.
But although the manipulative editing of Donald Trump was admitted by the BBC to have been a slip of standards, SVT maintained that there was no wrongdoing on their part. They had through the sheer volume of their unwavering support in large parts of the population succeeded in negating their embarrassment – until the next scandal struck.
AI-generated footage presented as news
Hardly a week had passed until SVT was in the limelight again, this time for showing a video purportedly of a police officer in New York City arguing with an ICE agent, representing the supposed conflict between local law enforcement and Donald Trump’s heavy-handed crackdown on illegal migrants in major American cities. The only problem was that the video was generated by AI – the altercation between the policeman and the federal ICE agent was fictitious. The video itself, critics pointed out, was easy to identify as inauthentic due to a number of AI artefacts such as erroneous spellings of “police” as “poice” on one officer’s chest. Yet it passed under SVT’s supposedly rigorous fact-checking standard.
This blunder, easily brushed off as a one-time mistake, further revealed the bias of SVT when it comes to reporting on the United States, on Trump, and on immigration. The clip confirmed a leftist narrative that the White House’s active deployment of the federal border agency ICE was illegal and was facing pushback from local residents. It could be considered a typical case of human error and negligence, with the video itself likely having been lifted off social media – but in the light of public service claiming to hold itself to very high standards, it caused a very strong reaction among right-wing critics.
The news piece featuring the AI-generated clip was subsequently edited and SVT issued a public disclosure acknowledging the mistake that was made. Under normal circumstances, a perhaps proportional response. But at this point, there were four particular incidents in recent memory that had damaged SVT’s legitimacy.
In a televised studio debate featuring all eight party leaders in parliament in October, SVT had been reluctant to maintain order when the Left Party’s leader broke the rules of conduct by repeatedly interrupting and speaking over her opponents. Criticism towards the disorderly debate notoriously came from the Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson himself, who threatened to decline appearing in debates on SVT if they could not guarantee civility. Critics claimed that this indicated that SVT was less interested in informative discourse and more keen to produce entertainment and generate social media interactions.
The husband of SVT’s CEO, himself an author, is also due to feature in a travel and lifestyle documentary programme, where the idea is to “get to know” various public personalities and celebrities on exclusive travel destinations. Questions were quickly raised about the appearance of nepotism in SVT’s recruitment.
All of these recent stories taken together, they prompted the Sweden Democrats to unsuccessfully summon SVT to the council for cultural affairs in the parliament, for a hearing on their publishing ethics. There was no political support outside of the Sweden Democrats for this dressing-down of SVT, and the summoning was itself subject to condemnation by the other political parties; it was declared a violation of the independence of public service media, which should not answer to political interests.
The mantra about the “independence of public service” is like a red rag to the bull that is the Sweden Democrats and other voices on the right who are deeply critical of public service. In practice this is taken to mean that SVT and Radio Sweden are at liberty to do anything they want, with the tax payer money that funds them. This is a recurring divide within the governing coalition, which the Sweden Democrats are supporting with supply and confidence. The centre-right parties are very reluctant to actively use their political powers to steer public service in a different direction, lest they be accused of all manners of authoritarian and autocratic tendencies by the left.
The continued passivity by the centre-right when it comes to the faults of public service is subject to debate in right-wing circles. There are notable critical voices in the Moderates as well as the Christian Democrats, but so far their angry social media posts have not been translated to political action.
Wind in the sail for challengers to public service
Perhaps more potent against publicly funded left-wing bias than any political response so far is the strength of the alternative media sphere in Sweden. Most conservative ‘upstarts’ do not trace their origins specifically to the problems associated with SVT and Radio Sweden, but are a response to the politically correct mainstream media landscape as a whole.
In the varied flora of alternative Swedish news sites, newspapers, and Youtube channels, many fall to undercurrents found within the liberal right wing, such as libertarianism or other status quo critiques. The main objective here is to draw traditional ‘bourgeoise’ readers, who may be disappointed with the political correctness of mainstream liberal newspapers. They tend to embrace a sort of right-wing intellectualism and seek legitimacy by attracting expertise and ‘stealing’ notable commentators and professionals from established media.
Other sites, that have a general tendency to be larger, more controversial, and to more overtly embrace the “alternative” label, are clearly geared towards nationalism. Their traditional focus lies on immigration and crime, and they often identify themselves as outside of the mainstream by using radical rhetoric, and questioning sensitive narratives about foreign policy. It is more common for these types of projects, that operate exclusively on grassroot funding, to be a complement to established media, as opposed to direct competitors.
As such, most newspapers that have occupied a space in the alternative media sphere in Sweden do not necessarily wish to compete with public service directly. One of the reasons why is because their output is primarily text-based; it is exceedingly expensive to produce video, and that is money that the alternative media sphere does not have.
But as of late, a few media channels have however declared more open ambitions to challenge the dominance of SVT and Radio Sweden, such as Riks, a now independent platform that sprouted out media founded by the Sweden Democrats and thus has a stable basis of funding. A long-term project to supplant existing public service media with hard-working alternative media seems more realistic today than it did two years ago.
One of the most confident contenders in this race was launched only in late November; 100%. Fronted by entrepreneur and media personality Henrik Jönsson, this right-wing project strives to become a ‘voluntary’ alternative to SVT and Radio Sweden. They mainly stress the ‘coercive’ funding methods of public service, which is operated purely through tax money. 100% is by contrast funded anonymously through a number of well-endowed donors, and invites its viewers to support them financially as well. Scale-wise the project can be compared to GB News in the United Kingdom, which is unusual in the context of Sweden, where ambitious media is either built on legacy money, or tethers to mainstream ideology.
This opens up a difficult debate about transparency and undue influence on reporting by donors.
In Sweden it is generally seen as suspicious in certain sectors, such as media, to have private donors, and especially if they are anonymous – that is why there is a shimmer of sanctity on public service, which is deemed to operate unconditionally. Rather than problematising how state funding can weaken the imperatives to adapt and to be attentive to the public interest, the finances of SVT and Radio Sweden is commonly hailed as a strength by both media and (most) politicians.
In a similar vein, media subsidies, which exist in Sweden and are virtually the only thing keeping traditional local newspapers afloat, are deemed as a prerequisite for a free and unobstructed media climate. In reality, the critics of the subsidies would argue, this tax-funded infusion is harmful to the Swedish media flora as it prevents unsustainable business models, including reporting biases, from being corrected.
These are the attitudes that 100% is up against, if it truly wishes to conquer the market from public service. It should be noted that a previous major ‘alternative’ right-wing newspaper launch in 2020, Bulletin, largely failed to make the dent it was expected to despite its massive funding and notable recruitments. In the end, it might not be a pile of money that allows anybody to shape the public consciousness of Sweden – there are significant cultural barriers in the way.
How big is the problem of bias at SVT?
The picture painted here is that Swedish public service media completely disregards any and all criticism it gets, and that it does not at all fulfill its mission to provide the population with fair and balanced perspectives on society and the world. Reality is however perhaps more nuanced than the polarised political discourse would admit. Frothing-at-the-mouth leftist narratives have arguably become rarer in the last decade. Productive journalism that reveals the injustices of immigration, multiculturalism, and Islam, the right wing’s favoured topics, are nonetheless still being produced, even though it would be hard to argue that it is at a rate that tips the scale from left-wing bias to true neutrality.
Some departments of SVT, such as local stations, are more prone to producing outrageous instances of unbalanced perspectives. It has also been expressed on the right that Radio Sweden as a whole is noticeably more left-wing in its reporting than its televised equivalent. As a general rule, there are higher expectations on the most prestigious public service news programmes, and they thus seem to adhere to a tighter stringency when it comes to striking a balance between left- and right-wing perspectives.
As mentioned previously, the United States and Donald Trump are two topics where public service – and this is likely to ring true across all of Europe – are very reluctant to question the prevailing narrative. This may be a result of a general recklessness that seems to characterise foreign reporting as a whole. It is easier to get away with misrepresenting a politician or an issue in a different country.
SVT at various points and in various ways trying to correct the perceived imbalances, which is probably necessary for their branding and long-term legitimacy, has on many occasions been taken as a sign of weakness by the left. There is an ongoing discussion on the left about public service being biased in favour of the right wing, which may sound absurd considering the obvious tendencies of the structure and the networks of people that constitute public service media in Sweden. Often, the narrative supported by these leftist voices is that the Sweden Democrats have through their influence on the current centre-right government been successful in wresting control over public service. Every right-leaning programme or story that SVT and Radio Sweden happens to air gives rise to this very discussion on left-wing forums and media circles.
For some concrete studies on the phenomenon of bias, there has been recurring polling once every few years about the political party sympathies of journalists at SVT and Radio Sweden. The results show an overwhelming, crushing majority for left-wing parties. The Left Party alone gathers 32 percent of SVT journalists according to a 2019 study by Chalmers University in Gothenburg, which is bigger than even the Social Democrats’ 24 percent. The main centre-right party the Moderates received a ridiculously low 4 percent, and the Sweden Democrats, 2,7 percent.
Anecdotally, there are a number of former journalists working at SVT or Radio Sweden who have testified to an intellectual rigidity among their peers. Profiles such as Joakim Lamotte have made their careers out of being whistleblowers who escaped the left-wing bubbles at public service.
There is as such a lot that speaks to serious problems at SVT and Radio Sweden, problems that may resemble those found in other countries’ public service media, but that nonetheless are magnified by the particular culture of Sweden.
How does one solve this problem? Tentatively, perhaps the taboo about political fine-tuning needs to be broken. As tax-funded organisations, public service should in some respects answer to the democratically elected representatives of parliament – not denounce the party that voted to summon them. An overtly politically appointed board of overseers with powers to raise complaints about particular programmes is perhaps one step in the right direction. Even if this challenges the independence of public service, it also creates transparency and accountability. That might be just what needs to be invested in, when a significant portion of the population does not believe in public service’s independence anyway.