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It is a common phenomenon in Europe and in the West in general that established media are accused of being left-wing. Even state-run media that have a public service mission and are financed by citizens’ tax money are usually accused in different countries of being left-wing.
In Sweden, public service has had a great importance. The country was late in deregulating the TV market and it is in the DNA of many Swedes that the state television and state radio are the country’s common forum for objective information and comprehensive debate.
But with the new political conflict between progressive liberalism and socialism on the one hand and new conservatism on the other, the question of the impartiality of the state media has become more inflamed.
Serious surveys show that Swedes who vote for the large left-wing bloc of Social Democrats, Green parties and left-wing radicals think that public service does a good job, that public service is impartial and objective. On the other hand, voters who vote for the new right-wing alliance, which includes traditional right-wing parties but also the new and large Sweden Democrats, think that state media is left-wing. The question is whether they are all wrong.
However, the various managers who have come and gone at public service do not seem to want to see the problem. They defend themselves tooth and nail against accusations of left-wing bias and believe that they are fulfilling exactly the mission they were given by the Swedish parliament. They provide a comprehensive picture of social development and allow different perspectives to be included in their programs.
The debate about the neutrality of state media became relevant again in connection with many Swedish journalists signing a petition about journalism in Gaza. It was claimed that journalists are being prevented from doing their job, that journalists have also become targets of the warfare, and that Swedish media houses are contributing to the violence and tragedy by not making real demands on Israel to allow journalists into Gaza.
Apparently, today no foreign journalists are allowed into Gaza. Over 60,000 Palestinians are said to have been killed since October 7th, and new reports are constantly coming in about famines among the population. An information war is taking place at the same time as the conventional war and Hamas and Israel blame each other for the situation. Of course, there is a lot for journalists to report on, and no one in Sweden has really complained that journalists are being made aware of the working conditions of journalism in a war zone. There was another problem with the appeal: It was entirely directed at Israel. It was Israel’s refusal to let journalists report from Gaza that was presented as problematic. The fact that Hamas does not hold either freedom of expression or freedom of the press particularly high was not mentioned. In fact, Hamas’s role in the conflict was not mentioned at all in the appeal. Nevertheless, over 500 Swedish journalists signed on. Including a few journalists from state radio and television.
The attention was enormous. Not because a few journalists demanded better working conditions for journalists in Gaza, but because the picture of the conflict was so one-sided. Nothing was said about Hamas being able to end the conflict by releasing the hostages and laying down its weapons. Not a word about the October 7 attack. Only Israel was singled out as being guilty of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The word genocide was also mentioned, and it was of course Israel that was engaged in this. The authors of the appeal even claimed that Swedish media houses were complicit in the genocide by underreporting Israel’s war crimes.
The appeal was published in the national daily newspaper Expressen. This was also led by a journalist, Magda Gad, who has long profiled herself as sympathetic to the Muslim Middle East and to Palestine. The formulation that attracted the most attention was precisely the one that Western and Swedish media houses themselves are contributing to the genocide in Gaza. This is what they wrote: “At the same time, the reporting from Swedish and other established media in Europe and the USA has been substandard and, through its shortcomings, has contributed to legitimizing what is now described by most genocide and even Holocaust experts as just that: an ongoing genocide.”
For many Swedes, this appeal was a confirmation of what they already thought they knew: the Swedish journalistic profession is characterized by left-wing sympathies. This time it was about a conflict outside Europe, but this conflict too has now acquired a right-left dimension because right-wing politicians in the West seem to have an easier time expressing understanding for Israel’s actions against Hamas than left-wing politicians have. In Sweden, for example, it is the radical left-wing and former communist party “The Left Party” that has most clearly demanded condemnation of Israel.
Some media houses announced after the appeal that the employees who had signed the text might not be allowed to report any more on the conflict in Gaza. This acknowledged that there was a political angle to the appeal. And it was the one-sided identification of Israel as solely responsible for the human suffering in Gaza that was perceived as problematic. Among them were journalists at the state-owned radio company Sveriges Radio and the state-owned TV company Sveriges Television who would now not be allowed to report any more on the conflict. Many Swedes who had long tried to point out the political leanings of the Public Service sensed a morning wind. Perhaps there was a limit to how clear political positions journalists could take?
But after a few days, the announcement came that all journalists would be allowed to continue reporting on Gaza. The head of Sveriges Radio had even summoned the journalists from Sveriges Radio to a meeting and many of them allegedly resigned. But still, there were no consequences. The head of the newspaper Aftonbladet, Klas Wolf-Watz, wrote to the national newspaper Aftonbladet regarding the decision to let the journalists continue working: “The main message of the appeal is issues of press freedom and safety for journalists in Gaza. It is not controversial.” So, the Swedish taxpayers and media consumers who were promised an impartial Public Service had to accept, once again, that the public service would continue to work despite its bias. The information they are given about the conflict between Israel and Hamas is conveyed by journalists who clearly have no understanding whatsoever of Hamas’s role in the conflict.
Now that the worst of the uproar surrounding the call itself has subsided, the debate has entered a second phase. Now several experienced journalists seem to be focusing on damage minimization. The experienced Middle East journalist Cecilia Uddén is interviewed in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter and explains that a reporting journalist should strive to be impartial but that he or she can never be completely objective. A well-known journalist, Göran Rosenberg, develops the same type of reasoning in a debate article in Expressen where he writes: “All journalism worth the name has a subject – the journalist himself – regardless of whether it is reported or not. Impartiality cannot therefore be made a question of what a journalist subjectively thinks and thinks and perhaps sometimes utters, but of the truthfulness, accuracy, reliability, judgment and relevance of the programs and reports that the journalist produces.”
So impartiality should not consist of avoiding taking a position in conflicts without giving a true picture of the conflict. Even when it comes to international conflicts that have a politically explosive force even within many Western countries. Ok. Then we know.
So, what can we learn from this? Perhaps some parts of the established media are getting rid of a narcissistic self-image where they claim that journalism can be impartial and neutral. There are conflicts where we cannot be impartial, they say.
The problem is that this is exactly what the right-wing media has been saying for a long time in various Western countries. – There is too much at stake for us to be impartial. – Our opponents claim to be impartial, but aren’t they? Why should we be? – A real media should give a truthful picture of a social development instead of blurring the picture behind some alleged objectivity.
So sure: If the media left wants to give its truthful picture of the conflict in Gaza, we on the right can give our truthful picture of EU bureaucracy, accelerated green transition and uncontrolled illegal immigration.