The Media Market

The Swedish Public Service Broadcasting Company (SVT) has forced one of its employees, Per Gudmundson, to close down his blog . Gudmundson, who has become one of Sweden's most important bloggers, is a threat to the impartiality of Swedish journalists, according to SVT. This censorship is interesting in many ways: According to the logic of SVT, what one journalist at SVT is doing on his free time away from work (i.e. publishing a somewhat rightwing blog) may apparently hurt the impression of the SVT news organisation as an impartial news source, while it is less of a problem that a grand majority of the employees are staunch leftists and that there are frequent allegations about leftist bias in the way the reporters are carrying out their daily assignments. The recent censorship is even more inconsistent if we take into account all the transgressions made by more established editors, like Björn Elmbrant, at the Swedish Public Broadcasting Network, who has published books and arguments based on a leftist point of view. Not to mention Jens Orback, the newly appointed member of the Labour cabinet, who has been sitting in the Labour Cabinet's Gender Equality Committee and been elected as a local offial for the Labout party in Stockholm, while at the same time been working as a journalist for Swedish Public Service TV. At least some voices in Sweden are now adressing these problems.

Pravda - The Swedish Way.