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If only Sveriges Radio, and the Swedish mainstream media as a whole, would somehow get rid of their notorious habit of self-censorship. They've had 250 years ti
by janmarsal 3y ago
If only Sveriges Radio, and the Swedish mainstream media as a whole, would somehow get rid of their notorious habit of self-censorship. They've had 250 years time to finely craft a system in which you don't even need to censor anything because the press does it by themselves.
- willvarfar 3y agoCan you give examples of their self-censorship?
- earthnail 3y agoThe law of Jante is a good read, and it is a surprisingly good description of Skandinavian societies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
- throw-4e451c8 3y agoFreedom House, Freedom of the Press 2013 - Sweden: "most of the mainstream media view criticism of immigration and Islam as a form of hate speech" https://www.refworld.org/docid/5238498214.html https://www.refworld.org/docid/5238498214.html
- jruohonen 3y ago[flagged]
- throw-4e451c8 3y agoBoth parts of that sentence stand on their own. How do you feel that omitting the first part changes the meaning of the second part? Also: please take a moment to read the HN guidelines on comments.
- jruohonen 3y agoI apologize for calling someone a propagandist.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lillecarl 3y agoPersonally I feel like the media inhibiting freedom of speech when they're pushing their list of OK things to think down people's throat and stigmatize even discussing certain topics.
- estomagordo 3y agoAs what you describe does not limit anyone's freedom of speech, you're factually wrong though.
- depressedpanda 3y agoThat's a myopic take. Soft enforcement is still enforcement.
- estomagordo 3y agoBut nobody described any enforcement here.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoWell, criticism is an opinion; everyone is entitled to their opinions (freedom of speech), but I expect neutrality from journalists. That is, a journalist can report on immigration, but a personal opinion (or criticism) has no place in the news itself. Journalism and personal opinions or interpretations of the news should be kept separate IMO.
- throw-4e451c8 3y agoDo you see anyone here arguing that journalistic reports should be biased by personal opinion? You're making quite some leaps there.
- jruohonen 3y agoUS readers should understand that the Swedish society is increasingly polarized. These allegations of self-censorship are closely related. While there is a grain of truth in the claims about immigration issues viz self-censorship, it is certainly not the case any more in 2023 due to the rise of Sweden Democrats.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI have a theory that countries that fought the powers that be in one of the many revolutions have a fundamentally different relationship to their institutions than countries that never did (like Sweden).
- gbrindisi 3y agoTrue that, it also shows in their privacy laws
- mantas 3y agoDitto. In my whereabouts regime changed 5-10 times since 1900 depending on how you count. With several fight-for-freedom with different vectors. 1800s was more stable, but dotted with uprisings. No stone was left unturned. Multiple times. The result? General notion is the government is jackasses and fuck authority in general. Which is vastly different from trust-the-government feeling in, for example, Sweden. This was (and still is, decades later) the biggest cultural shock to me.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoSweden may also be a bit of an outlier in that it has a fairly young collective sense of identity, essentially rebuilding from scratch in the mid-late 19th century well into the 20th century, recovering from the century of poverty, squalor, and collective shame that followed the failed imperial ambitions of Charles XII; like really, it's a past most people would rather not dwell on. Dunno what's a good analogy. It's like Japan, except the a-bombs fell during the Edo period and the entire country was like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY for 150 years.
- Technotroll 3y agoI seriously doubt this. How can an entire people be responsible for what its king decides to do? Moreover, there's always been a strong bond between Scandinavian despite living under different rulers and conditions. But fair enough, counties were more marginalized 1000 years ago, and as such they could act in a more insular way, though that isn't particularly unique to Sweden.
- pavlov 3y agoThe point of freedom of the press is that you can publish what you want, it’s not that you’d be able to somehow compel “mainstream media” to publish what you want.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoThat’s the means. Putting things in print or on air has no value in itself; it’s having a viable avenue to have them heard and propagated that’s important. (It doesn’t matter that you typed your samizdat issue on your own typewriter and not commandeered a printing press, you’re still going to prison. Hell, as we know nailing a piece of paper to a church door can be bad enough.) The point is that public thought stagnates and rots once it’s impossible to publish dissenting opinions and a sucking swamp of apparent conformity sets in. A central government is inordinately efficient at enforcing such conformity, so it shouldn’t get the chance to, thus the conventional formulation. I’d expect that when that when the idea was first being established, a government was perhaps the only kind of entity with wide enough reach to enforce this. (Maybe along with a couple of paragovernments like the Catholic Church and the India Companies.) That’s not the case today. It’s telling that GP mentions a radio broadcaster, because radio caused a centralization of news like nothing before it (as often outside the direct control of governments as under it), and while the Internet had an opportunity to reverse that, except for a brief moment it mostly did not.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoAh, so its like a lifehack for governments - they never arrests you, but mysteriously everyone who disagrees with them is shadowbanned in every form of social media. No dissenting opinion is ever heard, so they get what they want. And we still technically have freedom of the press?
- pavlov 3y agoThat indeed works in China where they can ban you in every form of social media because they have active controls built in at every level. But China doesn't pretend to have freedom of the press either. In the West, how does the government shadowban me from my own Mastodon instance and my own hosted blog? Or Truth Social or Gab?
- krona 3y agoI was just about to say the same thing. Unfortunately I think it's so deeply ingrained in Swedish culture (Law of Jante etc.) that it's hard for most Swedes to even realise there's a problem, or at least that institutional conformity isn't always a virtue.
- estomagordo 3y agoI'm thinking if it had been notorious, people would know what you're referring to.