Sweden: The Country the Media Wants to Collapse

Christian Christensen on the sensationalism and ideological schadenfreude behind the UK and US media's ongoing obsession with Sweden's 'lost innocence'.

The media love a good utopia, and any utopia worth its salt is built on a combination of half-truths, public relations, mythologies, air, hopes, dreams and, yes, flat-out bullshit. And why do the media love utopias so much? A desire to see full equality? The love of witnessing perfection in another human being?

No. It’s because utopias are made to collapse.

Like a gory road accident, when utopias are sullied or destroyed, received wisdom is that people will be unable to look away. And in the attention economy not being able to look away is gold.

So, when a young father was recently shot and killed in front of his 12-year-old son by a gang in Stockholm, news outlets from outside of Sweden used the tragedy as an example of Sweden’s crumbling or lost utopia. The reaction inside of Sweden was wide and deep: politicians, media and citizens all shocked by the cold, horrific and inhuman nature of the crime. This was not the reaction of a people numbed to violence, nor the reaction of a nation that had ‘normalised’ murder.

Over the past year, there have been many articles in the US and UK press addressing the rise of gangs and gun use in Sweden. The attention has been huge considering that Sweden is small. In almost all of the pieces, Sweden was framed as a previously peaceful nation now and forever changed. A nation that has lost its innocence. The horrific murder of the young father solidified the idea that what we see before us is ‘not the Sweden we knew’.

It is clear that commissioning editors in US and UK newsrooms haven’t met many pitches for misleading, hyped-up articles about ‘collapsing Sweden’ they didn’t like.

But here’s the thing: Sweden has had its innocence declared lost many times before, only to have it magically reinstated and then lost again. Lost when Olof Palme was shot and killed on the street in 1986. Lost when Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death in a department store in 2002. Lost when Syrian refugees began to arrive in 2013. Lost when Stockholm experienced a terror attack in 2017. Lost when thousands of elderly died during the early stages of COVID in 2020. Lost when gun homicides peaked in 2022.

Let’s be blunt about why the media love to push this angle about Sweden. It’s sensationalism with a heavy dose of ideological schadenfreude. Many on the US/UK right hate Sweden because it was a social democracy that took in a large number of immigrants. So, any story that tears Sweden down also tears down the evils of leftist politics and a multiculturalism that stained a mythologically peaceful and ethnically homogeneous nation.

Of course, it’s somewhat complicated for those on the political right outside of Sweden that the Swedish ‘Golden Years’ they claim to yearn for came during the height of leftist social democratic rule they claim to hate. And that the political left was actually not in power when Sweden made the decision in 2013 and 2014 to take in Syrian refugees. But right-wing media and pundits have found an ingenious way to square those circles. They pretend it didn’t happen.

Sweden has always been more complicated than a national meme. Wealth inequality has risen sharply, and you can’t be one of the world’s largest (per capita) exporters of military weapons and play the charming, naïve schoolchild. The country has also gone through a transformative period of privatization and commodification.

Conversely, during these five decades of supposedly lost utopias, Sweden has maintained its ‘quality of life’ ranking as one of the best countries in which to live, seen sustained economic growth, has a generous and progressive social benefits system, is a leader in gender equality, and, yes, has a homicide rate that has been relatively and consistently low.

But that doesn’t mean that Sweden didn’t have crime. It surprises many people to hear that the per capita murder rate in Sweden was lower in 2023 than it was in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. And that the homicide rate in Sweden over the past five years has not exploded with the increase in gang and gun crime.

What has happened in Sweden over the last year, however, is that there has been a sharp rise in the killing of children and women, of children doing the killing, and of the use of guns in homicides (although 2023 saw a slight decrease from the high in 2022). In other words, while the number of murders has not changed, who is being killed, who is doing the killing and how they are killing have all shifted.

These – and not juvenile musings about lost innocence – are stories about Sweden worth telling. Without hype, lies or stereotyping.

The irony is that the media that claim to be so ‘concerned’ about violence in Sweden have let their inability to stop themselves from using historically and intellectually dishonest arguments about a ‘lost Sweden’ overshadow vital stories that beg to be covered by good, honest journalism. But that won’t happen because media concern for the victims is a cynical lie. Most media outlets – including many considered to be part of the ‘liberal media’ – are more interested in leveraging shock and outrage to score clicks than discuss Sweden for what it is: a nation like any other, with both points of light and pockets of darkness.

So, when a young father is murdered in Stockholm, the best way for journalism to honor his memory is to cover the event openly, critically and in depth. To interrogate all areas of power and responsibility. But, to exploit the crime by lying about violent chaos that’s not happening in a utopia that never existed? That is journalistic malpractice. Citizens and victims deserve better.

---

Christian Christensen is Professor of Journalism at Stockholm University