Coverup and Whitewash in Sweden’s Power Triangle – Part III

Reverberations from the widely-circulated Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter‘s deliberate attempt to cover up massive, organized harassment by immigrants against Swedish girls which took place during a youth festival in Stockholm on August 15 have continued to roll through the mainstream, social, and alternative media over the last few days. The story has made a particular impact in media outside of Sweden – media that can’t be touched by the Swedish media’s omertá-like culture and journalistic esprit de corps. To the Swedish mainstream media, alternative media are always the enemy, and a beleaguered journalist colleague is always supported by everybody else on the inside of organized political correctness, no matter the content (or lack thereof) of his story, its ramifications, or the public’s right to know. When the facts don’t conform to political correctness, the usual competition in reporting between the various mainstream news agencies ceases, and the only priority then is to keep the alternative media on the fringe, regardless of the facts.

Norway’s media and its national trade union of journalists know few such constraints. This union’s periodical for members, Journalisten, has now interviewed the psychologist whose contact with Nyheter Idag sparked the furor (and who is no longer with the Stockholm Police Department), as well as the police sergeant who we have discussed in earlier articles. They continue to stand by their contentions of the past week: that the harassment in question was massive and organized, that the perpetrators were immigrants or obviously had an immigrant background, and that all the victims chosen for harassment were Swedish girls. Furthermore, they confirm that no amount of effort helped in trying to get Dagens Nyheter to pick up the story at the time, and that only Nyheter Idag responded nearly half a year later, when the psychologist lost patience with the on-again-off-again demeanor of the Dagens Nyheter journalist who eventually brought the matter to the surface subsequent to similar events that occurred on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany. In a debate on Norwegian TV, an author and reader from the Oslo School of Business, Elin Ørjasæter, also confronted Swedish mainstream media journalist Martin Aagård about his and the Swedish mainstream media’s basic lack of integrity and truthfulness in reporting, as demonstrated by their willingness to deliberately misquote police reports live on TV about the events of August in order to temporarily save face.

Meanwhile, the centrepiece of the entire spate of events, the journalist at Dagens Nyheter who had had contact with sources who could have provided her with all the necessary material for a headline news story about them, but then chose or was ordered to drop the lead, published an article that was purportedly her last word concerning her involvement. The gist of the article is that anyone can choose, at their discretion, to trust or ignore any source of information, and that she held her own position to be one of accuracy and integrity, just as that of her employer. There was nothing new in the manner in which facts or reflections were offered in the article, which was little more than a plea for the public to place implicit trust in her and the mainstream media’s good intentions and journalistic integrity.

She may have to wait some time for that to return. Stay tuned for more reports as events continue to unfold.

Also read: Part I, Part II