See what is real and important

Is it the role of the press to save the country from small new parties with unsympathetic or crazy agendas? No is the obvious answer. It is the role of the voters. But still, isn’t it the duty of the press to help voters understand what is in their best interest? Now it gets harder.

Every now and then in the media debate, the expression “consequence neutrality” comes up. A person who lauds consequence neutrality as a journalistic principle believes that the decision to publish should only be founded on the news value of an event, not on a consideration of the potential consequences of publishing. People should publish everything that is true and relevant without thinking about whether the headlines will be favourable or unfavourable to one party or another, one interest or another.

I have to point out straight away that this argument is about news journalism in a broader sense. It should be said that opinion journalism neither can nor should be consequence-neutral. After all, its objective is to influence the world. It should also be said that I am ignoring that the boundary between one and the other, between news reporting and opinion-making, news and views, is in practice unclear and fluid, and that is not always crystal clear what is true or what is relevant in the matter.

We are dealing here with journalism’s Platonic world of ideas, one where consequence neutrality is the reasonable approach in journalism, for two reasons:

1. Journalism is part of the democratic system of oversight. Citizens should have access to factual material that is as broad and sound as possible when they elect their representatives and take positions themselves on important issues in society. Then the press should not act like a meddlesome parent and install a censorship filter.

2. Reality is not a billiard table. Journalism based on the expected effects of publishing decisions is impossible simply for the reason that no one can be sure ahead of time that the balls will roll in the way editors imagine. The impact, the decision to publish, can have consequences completely other than those intended. The destiny of headlines is unfathomable.

An example: In September 1993, Expressen published a Sifo survey on Swedish attitudes toward immigration. The survey served as the basis of a series of articles that were marketed under the placard headline “Drive them out!”.

I have spent a large part of my professional life at Expressen and am strongly shaped by the legacy of liberal ideas that this newspaper holds in trust. Perhaps that is why I am still convinced that the intention of this disastrous headline was not just to attract attention and sell papers in a way that has become routine in the Swedish media world: by putting on clown’s noses and saying something stupid but tough. I was convinced then, and still am convinced, that their intention was also to hold a mirror to the Swedish people and say: Look here! These scary views are your views. Do you really want to see a population of xenophobic, narrow-minded and intolerant skinflints when you look in the mirror? No, you don’t want to! So make things better right now!

That is, amongst all the different arguments, there was also a strain of that good old-fashioned liberal fervour to cultivate, a keenness to preach liberal tolerance and generosity, a desire to fight for the values that have sustained Expressen ever since the paper’s anti-Nazi birth – values that were so self-evident to the editors that no one dreamt that anyone would misunderstand the newspaper’s views and convictions. That was wrong.

That was completely wrong. The general view in Sweden was that Expressen was speculating in xenophobia. The lesson was: It doesn’t matter what your views are. What counts is how readers and listeners and viewers understand what you are saying. Or to parody Tegnér’s “Skidbladner” – What is reality? What readers feel, what readers experience – that is real. Thus – in principle, consequence neutrality.

But in practice, every editorial board still takes into account the consequences of its articles or news reports. Mainly for humane reasons. If someone publishes sensitive information about the victim of a murder, there are consequences for the survivors. Professional journalists are aware of this, take this into account and weigh these consequences against what is known as the general interest.

There are also ideological grounds for consequence neutrality being a problem in practice. The press, a term I prefer to “the media”, which calls to mind spiritual séances and dancing tables, is not neutral in value. It stems from the Enlightenment and modernity. The emergence of the press coincides with the struggle for freedom and democracy.

Western journalists operate from a broadly defined liberal-democratic base of values. The job of the press is to tell what actually happened in the world. It is also supposed to safeguard these shared democratic values and serve as a critical corrective to political power.

This means that if a new political party clearly defines itself as being outside the democratic discourse, makes it its goal to undermine and in the long run smash the fundamental values of democracy to pieces, then the press neither can nor should take a consequence-neutral approach to this party.

Were an out-and-out Nazi party to succeed in becoming established in Sweden and was on the verge of entering Parliament with a platform based on anti-Semitism and racism, it would be absurd for the press to demand that this party be treated like any other party. A party like that should be discriminated against. I would like to remind readers that the word “discriminate” comes from “to divide, separate”.

Does this also hold for the Sweden Democrats? Yes, I rather think so, with a few reservations. There are good reasons to separate the Sweden Democrats from the political parties that have a stable grounding in democratic values. The same was true of the Left Party before it changed its name from the Communist Party of Sweden.

With roots in a racist subculture and its recoded ideology of intolerance (culture instead of race), the Sweden Democrats still have a lot to prove before they can be seen as one party among many.

That does not mean that the press should not write about the party. Treating the Sweden Democrats differently means not entitling the party to the same right, as we say automatically, to newspaper coverage provided to established parliamentary parties. This attitude, however, comes into conflict with a journalistic knee-jerk reaction: the desire to always give priority to the new over the old and to the sensational over the uncontroversial.

If a party shows up saying sensational but nasty things, what do journalists do then? We try to sell the burka and hide in it all at the same time. We fill pages with one indignant article after another about that horrible party that no sane person should take seriously.

One could call this the Sven Lidman line, after the lusty, decadent Swedish poet Lidman, who converted to Pentecostalism and was immensely happy depicting in juicy detail the sinful way of life that now filled both him and his ever attentive congregation with repugnance.

One could also call it the Stagnelius strategy after the unhappy Romanic poet who denounced the wretchedness of the temporal world by vividly describing the delights of paradise that could not be enjoyed here on earth: “Paradise’s moonlit nights, /Eden’s flower-crowned plains, /angels of the light on high/never to be beheld by your eye.”

That is, people write and talk ceaselessly about the new party. Sometimes, there does not seem to be any other party at all. But they do it in an indignant, accusatory way that makes it clear to one and all that the party should not exist.

The result is that such people readily come across as dogmatists and the party in question as the victim of bullying. Dangerous, dangerous. Few things can rouse the Swedish population to repudiation, in this case of the press, and solidarity, in this case with the Sweden Democrats, as much as suspicions of bullying.

Disclosure is the favoured journalistic approach when the press is to take on new parties with an unsympathetic bent. Swedish journalists unflaggingly try to expose how the Sweden Democrats, like New Democracy before them, are really a racist party.

A somewhat timely and moreover successful example of this ambition was the series of reports on the Sweden Democrats by the radio programme Kaliber in spring 2009. A reporter had infiltrated the Sweden Democrats’ youth league, went along on a ferry ride across the Baltic and could to her dread and delight serve as eyewitness to community singing on board the ferry. Her momentary party friends broke into one compromising song after another.

It was unexpectedly entertaining to listen to when the programme was aired. But the journalistic content was neither surprising nor ear-opening.

Trying to unmask the Sweden Democrats as anti-immigrant is as meaningful as trying to reveal that the Conservatives really want to reduce taxes or that there are scenes of intercourse in porn films. After all, hostility to immigrants is the party’s business concept.

“Very few voters turn to the Sweden Democrats because they have good school, healthcare, labour market and economic policies,” notes the journalist Pontus Mattson wryly in a book covering the party, Sverigedemokraterna in på bara skinnet [‘The Sweden Democrats up close’] (2009).

In some way, that makes the Sweden Democrats immune to investigative journalism. Reporters say what the party representatives themselves would say if they only dared. The investigative journalists reveal that the Sweden Democrats are still anti-immigrant, thus placating core voters who might start to worry on that issue. Energetic journalism that exposes the truth many times runs the risk of serving in actuality as an advertising campaign for the party exposed.

So what should the press then do? Perhaps like Expressen in the series of party leader interviews the newspaper published in September 2009. The leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, got no questions at all about the party’s core activity, immigration policy.

By interviewing populist niche parties about everything except their very niche, the press in the best case kills two birds with one stone. It both comes across as impartial and fair and gets the niche party’s representatives to come across as stupid and incompetent. But in the long run, it is of course not possible to avoid the issues that are vital to the niche parties. So how does one handle a party like the Sweden Democrats?

The answer has to be awfully dull. One provides consistent and normal opinion making on the editorial pages and impartial investigative news journalism on the news pages.

Journalists often have an inflated view of their own power and importance. We would like to believe that we are the ones who are kingmakers, that we are the ones with power to determine which newly formed parties will grow and become large enough to enter Parliament.

The classic example is usually New Democracy. It started with an article on Dagens Nyheter’s op-ed page. Then a Sifo survey was released that was presented by Siewert Öholm on the television programme “Svar Direkt”. And then Bert and Ian were a hit. Perhaps. But then how to explain the Environmental Party’s entry into Parliament and the Christian Democrats’ conversion from a political sect to a political power factor?

The media are important – it would be naïve to claim otherwise. But if small parties are to become large, there must be fertile ground; otherwise, their roots would never take hold. There must be a correspondence between the big, broad currents of the era and the party’s distinctive issues. There was something that resonated for both the Greens and the Christian Democrats. That is why they succeeded in becoming established. There was concern, about the environment and the future of the traditional family, respectively, that was crying out to be politically articulated.

Other newly formed parties have failed in elections despite considerable media interest. The Feminist Initiative is one example. Another is the only party that I have been personally involved in, the Sarajevo List. The party was started in 1995 and ran in the EU elections on only one fundamental issue: the world had to intervene in Bosnia in order to put a stop to ethnic cleansing. Half the candidates on the list were journalists; the others were prominent actors and writers. We received public support from celebrities like Ulf Lundell and Jonas Gardell. Our media coverage was favourable, to say the least it. Nonetheless, we received only one per cent of the votes.

The importance of the media impact cannot be overemphasised. Yet it is not enough to be considered interesting by the press. In order to become successfully established, a new party must also have credibility on an issue that has broad support among voters.

It is in view of this that the Pirate Party’s success in the 2009 EU elections reinforces my misanthropy. If Swedes’ commitment to end a genocide in progress was enough for one per cent of the votes in 1995, then in that case a whole seven per cent of voters felt so strongly about their right to free consumption of romantic comedies and hip hop fourteen years later that they chose to vote pirates into the European Parliament. And the Pirate Party did not even have a charismatic celebrity as its leading figure.

I end where I began, with consequence neutrality. No matter how lawful in principle it is, there are strong reasons to raise an admonishing finger. Not allowing the publication of important news to be checked by fears of one consequence or another is one thing, and moreover an important thing. But not taking into account any consequences of a massive wallowing in nonsense is another.

Consequence neutrality combined with the journalistic dogma that what is new is always more exciting than what is already established creates a journalistic climate which, if it becomes permanent, favours the emergence of the most bizarre conceivable and inconceivable niche parties. The Norrland Party, supported by celebrities like Ingemar Stenmark and Börje Salming, should be considered one of the more serious of this kind.

Otherwise, there is good reason to feel a bit concerned when one surveys the Swedish media landscape. What really is important today? Not currency policy, not even politicians’ mobile phone bills. What is really important is the power struggle on “Mästarnas mästare” [‘Champion of champions’] and the viewer voting on “Let’s Dance”.

Even a classic grey-suit TV show like [the national television broadcaster] SVT’s evening news programme “Aktuellt” has shown tendencies of preferring to dance the cha-cha-cha. With some surprise, a masochistically devoted viewer of “Aktuellt” may find the topic that evening is Sweden’s chances in the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest.

It should not be long before a “schlager music” party runs for election on the promise of reforming the qualifying rounds and leading Sweden’s entry next year to a Eurovision victory.

I am being serious. When the heavyweight parties dance cheek to cheek, so close to one another that it is impossible to determine who is leading, there is plenty of room on the margins for gimmicks and pranks. The Poker Party? The Snuff Party? The Twitter Party? The Make-Out Party? The Hooky Party? The Tax-Free Party? The Cheesecake Party? The Mad Men Party? The No-Salt-on the-Pavements-in-Winter Party? The Spinning Party?

It is becoming ever more important for the press to be able to withstand the temptation of following their instincts, those who insist that anyone that says something really barmy and does so first is always more interesting than someone who invariably has something sensible to say.