Why Wokeism Ruined Journalism — Everywhere
Swedish journalist quits and pens scathing criticism of the mainstream media
Like much of the rest of Europe, Sweden has been very progressive when it comes to accepting migrants from around the world. For the last 50 years, more people have come to Sweden as migrants than have left.
But Sweden’s liberal migration policies also brought something the nation had never before experienced: gang violence. Previously one of the safest places to live in the world, Sweden today has the second highest gun death rate in Europe.
“The criminal gangs involved in Sweden’s urban warfare are run largely by second-generation immigrants,” admits the ardently pro-migration Financial Times. Twenty percent of Sweden’s 10.5 million citizens are foreign-born, which is twice as many as in 2000. The result was a national debate about what the nation’s center-right Prime Minister, who came to power in 2022, calls “failed integration.”
And yet, as immigrant crime worsened in Sweden, the mainstream media there remained woke, more committed to ideological correctness than reporting the news, according to Swedish journalist Malin Ekman. This ideological correctness extended to her reporting on Donald Trump as the United States correspondent for the Swedish national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) starting in 2019.
“I began to feel a shift during the autumn of 2023,” she writes below. “While my pieces read like before, the editorial response became different. I was told to write through my editor’s eyes. The focus was no longer on whether the reporting was true and factual but on how it “might be perceived.”
And so Ekman quit. And, like former New York Times editor, and Free Press Founder, Bari Weiss, Ekman published an open letter, criticizing the state of journalism. And, like Weiss’s open letter, Ekman’s provoked a national debate.
In the leftwing newspaper Dagens ETC, Martin Aagård wrote that she had done something “unforgivable,” namely fueling “the nationalist right seeking to narrow freedom of the press.” In VLT, Daniel Nordström wrote that she had “now unleashed the black monster of the internet.”
We proudly publish Ekman’s letter below, modified modestly to be intelligible to an American audience.
Ekman’s revolt against wokeness is timely. For the first time in a half-century, more people are leaving Sweden than arriving as migrants. The reason is because the new government has taken steps to clamp down on illegal immigration. As such, as is increasingly the case in the West, the voters are one step ahead of the media.
— Michael
Why Wokeism Ruined Journalism — Everywhere
In 2019, I became SvD's correspondent in New York. It was Donald Trump's last full year in office, a unique time. Reporting by legacy media had become one-sided, and similarly, Swedish journalism was predictably tendentious in its depictions of what had happened to American society.
SvD, by contrast, sought to provide its readers with counterpoints to prevailing narratives during this time. This was evident in the newsroom culture and the newspaper’s marketing: “Readers should be triggered to think for themselves”; “We want to give you more perspectives”; “Curiosity for American life and politics.”
Back then, lead editor Martin Ahlquist and I regularly discussed what was missing in Swedish media’s reporting on the US: scrutiny of the American left, reporting on the consequences of progressive gender legislation, coverage of increased lawlessness in America’s major cities, and analysis of why a growing number of minorities were voting for Republicans. My job was to provide in-depth reporting and analysis of these trends.
In addition to covering the Trump impeachments and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, I wrote about radical leftist ideology in schools and businesses, crime statistics, cancel culture, and self-censorship. I also reported on campus protests from inside the autonomous zones and in cities ridden by crime and drug abuse. These topics were essential to cover in order to paint a comprehensive picture of the US and the American electorate for SvD’s readers.
For several years, I felt stalwart editorial support for my reporting. The previous leadership described it as “an asset” for the newspaper and encouraged me to continue my “important work.” But the paper’s view of my work suddenly dimmed last year.
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