The 36-minute short documentary in the series "Swedish Pain Points" is now available to watch on SVT Play. It is about how top politicians have turned up the heat on established media.
In the program, Peter Jakobsson, associate professor of media and communication studies at Uppsala University, describes the emergence of a new kind of media criticism from the right-wing and alternative media, with the goal of undermining trust in the press.
Carl-Oskar Bohlin (M), Minister of Civil Defence, is one of those who has used social media to question traditional media. He objects to the researcher's thesis.
I don't agree with that. They lump the concept of media criticism into a homogeneous entity and they bring in a bunch of conspiracy theorists and all sorts of kitchen scum and then they try to blame it on me because I criticize individuals in specific cases, Bohlin says in the program.
The idea was to publish the documentary "Drevet" the Thursday before the election, but news management decided to postpone publication.
This happened after Bohlin posted his own version of the entire interview SVT did with him for the program on YouTube. Karin Ekman, editor-in-chief at SVT Nyheter, denied that the decision had anything to do with Bohlin's publication. The documentary was not finished.
"We never rush to publish strong in-house journalism," she told the newspaper Journalisten.
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