Anger when SvD defectors praise Trump

Published 30 October 2024 at 06.12

Media. Malin Ekman recently resigned as US correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet in protest against the newspaper's left-wing bias and censorship. Now she has got a new job where she writes positively about Trump – something that arouses anger among colleagues in Sweden.

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Fria Tider reported last summer about how Malin Ekman left SvD and in a “resignation letter” talked about how she felt she was censored if she did not angle her reports from a left-wing perspective.

“The reporting on the United States – in Sweden as well as other countries in the West – is incorporated into a ready-made narrative about Donald Trump as the enemy of democracy. Journalists have come to side with one side in the belief that this is the 'right one' and indirectly fight the other. Because the 'other side' is regarded as 'worse', the problems of one's own side are smoothed over,” she wrote, among other things.

Malin Ekman has now got a job as a columnist at Handelsbanken's venture Ekonomikanalen, where she continues to write about American politics. On Tuesday, she published an article with the headline “Trump's revenge on the haters in New York” – which really stuck in the eyes of many Swedish journalist colleagues.

On Aftonbladet, culture journalist Kjell Häglund comes with a long, furious reaction. “Malin Ekman buys everything Donald Trump says”, reads the headline.

“Malin Ekman's EFN columns are stunning in their sane-washing. Her account of Trump's 'mass rally' in Madison Square Garden completely omits the insanity, racism, sexism, lies, hatred and open dog whistles of the Proud boys and of the Nazi rally in the same arena in 1939 . And the column before that ignores most of what Trump himself said about his upcoming punitive tariffs and takes it upon himself to reinterpret the tariff policy into something that sounds normal political.

Häglund further claims that “more Republicans than ever are leaving Trump “.

“The fact that Malin Ekman still thinks she can stay in the Maga trap, and excuse and normalize it, is because so much of the documented knowledge about Donald Trump is 'hidden' in dig longreads behind a paywall, or generally marginalized due to the populist right's tireless 'fake news' campaign against 'mainstream media',” he writes.

The Christian Democrats' former party secretary Johan Ingerö writes in X that Kjell Häglund's reaction in Aftonbladet is “absolutely absurd”

“Not so much for the content as for the enormous amount of space devoted to having a journalist (with ordinary journalistic views) review another journalist (with unusual journalistic views). Such anger for ONE dissenting voice?” he writes.