Mass media in Sweden
The mass media in Sweden has a long tradition going back to the 1766 law enacting freedom of the press.
Swedish television and radio were until the mid-1980s a government monopoly, which slowly has been eroded despite resistance, with a call for prohibition of private ownership of satellite dish receivers.
Until 2019, public service media was financed by a special fee levied on owners of television or radio receivers.
Reporting ownership was voluntary, but television sellers were obliged to report purchase to the government, and the government also had a special service of agents, with equipment capable of detecting emissions from television receivers, patrolling residential areas in order to catch unreported receivers.
There was some controversy when Dagens Nyheter on 27 September 2003 published the name and picture of Mijailo Mijailović, who was the suspected assassin of Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh.
Its competitor, Expressen, is controlled by Bonnier AB and has sister editions in Gothenburg (GT) and Malmö (Kvällsposten).
The Local is one of the few English language general news websites in the country which has been the subject of attacks by groups such as Anonymous and has seen an upsurge of people complaining of censorship and bias.
In recent years, Swedish state broadcaster, Sverigesradio, has been offering a wider selection of news through its website in English.
Other major magazine publishers in Sweden are Allers förlag, the Danish-controlled Egmont and the French Hachette Filipacchi Médias.
In the early 1990s, TV4 became the first commercial channel to be allowed to join the national terrestrial broadcasting network, run by Teracom.
Sveriges Television is funded by a fee—fixed by Parliament and collected by the Kiruna-based Receiving Licence Agency, Radiotjänst i Kiruna AB—and is regulated, together with TV4, by the Swedish Broadcasting Commission.
The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (JMG) at Gothenburg University has conducted yearly surveys regarding their political party sympathies among the members of the Swedish Union of Journalists (Swedish: Journalistförbundet), the largest trade union organizing journalists in Sweden.
[4] After the elections 2010, the researcher Kent Asp studied more than 1000 articles from Sweden's major newspapers and found a strong bias towards the political right.
[5] As regards to foreign policy issues, Swedish media has often been reporting biased towards the United States and the George W. Bush administration, and towards Israel in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Uddén has stated in an interview that "in order to be able to describe the conflict honestly you have to side with the weaker part [i.e. the Palestinians]" (Swedish: "För att kunna beskriva konflikten ärligt måste man ta part med den svagare sidan.
[9] Criticism has focused on accusations that those in the media who shape public opinion often do this based on ideological constructs and exhibit a lack of awareness of current societal problems, often pointing to the fact that journalists and editors predominantly reside in segregated low-risk upper middle-class areas.
[14] In December 2010, the ruling Centre-Right Alliance was heavily criticized when they implemented a law that required that all new public service products needed to be pre-approved by the government before they could be approved.
[15] In June 2014, Norrköpings Tidningar published a story on genital mutilation,[16] which was picked up by the foreign press, including The Independent and The Daily News.
