The ruling in the Media Ethics Board comes at the same time as SVT is showing a three-part documentary about Joakim Lundell, but concerns another series that was shown on TV4 in February.
In "Scribbles - an Abandoned Child", the YouTube profile repeated offensive accusations against his mother, which have already been discussed in his autobiography "Monster", among other things.
The mother denies the allegations and reported TV4 to the Swedish Media Ombudsman (MO). Although she is not named in the series, the mother found her to be easy to identify.
"She was portrayed to millions of viewers as a mentally ill sadist who tormented her child," MO summarizes the mother's complaint in her complaint.
Harmful claims
MO Caspar Opitz made the assessment that TV4 had singled out the mother with harmful claims and took the matter forward to the Media Ethics Board, which agrees and blames TV4 for violating good journalistic practice.
The ruling by the Media Ethics Board means that TV4 must publish the decision and that the channel must pay an administrative fee of SEK 32,000. But this does not mean that TV4 automatically has to apologize or depublish the series, for example.
Mia Lindqvist, program director and responsible publisher of the TV4 documentary, says in a written comment to TT that they take the criticism into account but that, with reference to the ongoing debate, they believe that it "would be unfortunate" to depublish or change anything.
"Since the mother herself told her story, all the information is known in other media and if we remove the parts we have been blamed for, the criticism against us will be incomprehensible to viewers."
According to TV4, the mother was offered but declined to participate in the documentary.
SVT is reviewing
In SVT's series "Hate", documentary maker Bo-Göran Bodin has reviewed Joakim Lundell's medical records from social services and child and adolescent psychiatry and concludes that there is no evidence for Lundell's claims of abuse.
The final episode of the SVT series will be released on Tuesday.
