And as I sit here, wracking my brain and twitter feed for something worthy of a proper good rant, it out of the blue on my lunch break falls into my lap. A prominent young editorial leader of an equally prominent Swedish newspaper informs us that she’s leaving the dying paper business in favour of a political career with the Swedish conservative opposition.
Which surprises absolutely no one that has read her editorials.
The editorial chief, a young entrepreneurial lawyer with strong opinions and who’s a master of suppression techniques in debates, got wrapped up into the position while the western regional newspaper was gobbling up minor local newspapers only to stay moderately afloat. The idea was to hardline their editorial department, leaning away from its old habits of letting most of the political spectrum have a voice, toward streamlining it to promote one specific political point of view. Under her leadership, many of the old guard journalists and pundits left the newspaper, frustrated with the new direction that the paper was taking.
She made a controversial name of herself when she argued that the new right-wing nationalist party shouldn’t be excluded from political cooperation. And now, four years later when the liberal conservatists have started flirting with the right-wing nationalists, she jumps aboard the liberal conservatives’ reformation train.
So what’s the problem, you ask. An opinionated young go-getter gets controversial with the press and later goes on to become a political actor. This is not news. And truth be told, I did not know just how common that transition was before writing this piece. I didn’t know that Winston Churchill worked as a reported, if so only for a short stint, before turning to politics. I didn’t know that Sarah Palin used to be a sports commentator, though that doesn’t surprise me either. Even Benito Mussolini had an early career in journalism.
The problem is not with a journalist becoming political. Or being political. Politics is nothing but practical philosophy, in a way, and everything a journalist does is political. Whether they like it or not. No, the problem isn’t with one of the Swedish journalistic elites turning to politics. It is that a large actor of Swedish journalism has been used, and seemingly complicity and wittingly so, as a partisan political springboard. All in the callous effort to inflate their readership.
The thing is, while journalism is intrinsically tied to politics, I strongly believe that journalism should never hold political partisan loyalties. And what this example provides us with is a glowing example of how that important divide has become increasingly bridged as news media and journalism is growing desperate to retain reader loyalty. Instead of realigning their models to suit a new public climate, they opt instead to make of themselves a new partisan press. Loyal not to readers, but to political ideologies, which will inescapably influence what news they provide and how they provide them. Because when you’re loyal to a point of view, you can never be loyal to the truth.
Back in the mid nineteen hundreds, Sweden abolished the partisan press. But across the Atlantic, this is simply how the cookie crumbles. The partisan political news media is obvious to anyone that has spent even a single minute with Fox News and MSNBC running concurrently. Why? Because partisan news sell better. Her employment as head of the editorial staff was a clue to the paper’s ambitions to become a partisan tool. Her appointment into that same party is proof of it.
And that is a frightful indication of the shape of things to come for journalism in this country…
/Sebastian Lindberg 2/4-2019
WastedWords 