Why Wokeism Has Ruined Journalism Everywhere

Like many other European countries, Sweden has been very progressive in accepting migrants from all over the world. Over the past 50 years, more people have come to Sweden as migrants than have left.

But Sweden’s liberal migration policies also brought something the country had never seen before: gang violence. Sweden, once one of the safest places to live in the world, now has the second-highest rate of gun deaths in Europe.

“The criminal gangs involved in urban warfare in Sweden are largely run by second-generation immigrants,” admits the fervently pro-migration Financial Times. Twenty percent of Sweden’s 10.5 million citizens are foreign-born, twice as many as in 2000. The result has sparked a national debate over what the country’s center-right prime minister, who came to power in 2022, calls “failed integration.”

And yet, as immigrant crime rose in Sweden, the mainstream media there remained woke, more committed to ideological correctness than to reporting the news, according to Swedish journalist Malin Ekman. This ideological correctness extended to her reporting on Donald Trump as a US correspondent for Sweden’s national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) starting in 2019.

“I began to sense a shift in the fall of 2023,” she writes below. “While my pieces read as before, the editorial response changed. I was told to write through the eyes of my editor. The focus was no longer on whether the reporting was true and factual, but on how it ‘might be perceived.’”

And so Ekman resigned. And, like former New York Times editor in chief and Free Press founder Bari Weiss, Ekman published an open letter criticizing the state of journalism. And, like Weiss’s open letter, Ekman sparked a national debate.

In the left-wing newspaper Days ETCMartin Aagård wrote that she had done something “unforgivable,” namely fueling “the nationalist right that is trying to restrict press freedom.” In VLT, Daniel Nordström wrote that she had “now unleashed the black monster of the internet.”

We are proud to publish below Ekman’s letter, slightly edited to make it understandable for the American public.

Ekman’s revolt against wokeness is topical. For the first time in half a century, more people are to leave Swedes than migrants. The reason is that the new government has taken measures to tackle illegal immigration. And as is increasingly the case in the West, voters are one step ahead of the media.

— Michael

In 2019, I became SvD’s New York correspondent. It was Donald Trump’s last full year in office, a unique time. Traditional media coverage had become one-sided, and Swedish journalism was predictably biased in its portrayal of what had happened to American society.

SvD, on the other hand, wanted to offer its readers counterpoints to the prevailing narratives of the time. This was evident in the editorial culture and marketing of the paper: “Readers must be encouraged to think for themselves”; “We want to offer you more perspectives”; “Curiosity about American life and politics.”

At the time, editor-in-chief Martin Ahlquist and I regularly discussed what was missing in Swedish media coverage of the US: critically looking at the American left, reporting on the consequences of progressive gender legislation, reporting on the increasing lawlessness in America’s big cities, and analyzing why more and more minorities were voting Republican. My job was to provide in-depth reporting and analysis of these trends.

In addition to covering Trump’s impeachment and the events of January 6, 2021, I wrote about radical left ideology in schools and businesses, crime statistics, cancel culture, and self-censorship. I also covered campus protests in the autonomous zones and in cities plagued by crime and drug abuse. These topics were essential to cover in order to paint a complete picture of the US and the American electorate for SvD readers.

For years, I felt unwavering editorial support for my reporting. Previous management described it as “an asset” to the paper and encouraged me to continue my “important work.” But the paper’s view of my work suddenly faded last year.