Schibsted newspaper SvD’s US correspondent Malin Ekman is resigning after five years. The reason, she says, is that the newspaper, along with other Swedish media, has become too one-sided in its reporting, and that the focus is less on whether the texts are actually true, but rather on how they risk being perceived.
In her resignation letter, which was published on the Substack platform, Ekman argues that the coverage of the US “is being incorporated into a ready-made narrative of Donald Trump as an enemy of democracy”, which she says means that information that was usually considered relevant to the public is now not being reported. At the same time, unsubstantiated claims that cast Republicans and Trump in a bad light are being highlighted.
“Journalists have come to side with one side in the belief that it is ‘the right one,’ indirectly fighting the other”, she writes.
The correspondent herself says she began to experience a shift around the fall of 2023, when the response to her writing changed and she was asked to write through her “editor’s eyes”.
“The important thing is no longer that the texts are true and factual, but how they ‘risk being perceived'”.
Lost the joy of work
Ekman writes that it escalated to the point where she lost her former job satisfaction, felt she was letting down the paper’s readers, and that her writing had become “boring reports without insight, the opposite of what a correspondent is supposed to do”.
After meeting with management to discuss what Ekman describes as an untenable situation, they explained that if someone were to count her articles and see that she had written more critical of Democrats than Republicans, the paper would find it difficult to “support” her publicly.
“I have come to the conclusion that my current role does not allow for the kind of journalism I believe in and that readers deserve”, she concludes.
