70% of Swedish Journalists Have Left-Wing Sympathies, Survey Reveals

A survey by Norwegian pollster Nordiske Mediedager has revealed a great disparity between party sympathies of Swedish journalists and those of the general public, revealing an overwhelming left-wing bias among the press, the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported.

Wholly 70 percent of Swedish journalists support left-wing parties (the Left, the Social Democrats, and the Greens), while the conservative bloc (the Moderates, the Christian Democrats, and the Sweden Democrats) only garnered 10 percent of journalists' support (as opposed to 43.6 percent in the 2018 general election).

The opposition Left Party, formerly known as the Communist Party of Sweden, turned out to be the most popular among Swedish journalists at 32 percent. By contrast, in the 2018 election the Left only received 8 percent of the vote. The Greens were another outlier at 14.7 percent among journalists. The government's sidekicks received merely 4.4 percent in the 2018 general election and have been teetering on the 4 percent barrier ever since, according to polls.

By contrast, the right-wing Sweden Democrats turned out to be the least popular among journalists with a paltry 2.7 percent, whereas in the 2018 election the party finished third at 17.5 percent of the vote and has been consistently polling above 20 percent ever since.

Incidentally, a similar bias was revealed in Norway. Some 68.7 percent of Norwegian journalists said they would vote for the red-green left-wing bloc consisting of Labour and the Greens, as opposed to 17.8 percent of the general population. This makes the left-wing bloc more than three times more popular than the right-wing bloc among the Norwegian press.

A 2017 Norwegian study “Perceptions of journalistic bias: Party preferences, media trust and attitudes towards immigration” indicated that the further to the right the respondents were, the greater the tendency to perceive the press as angled toward the left. No corresponding connection among left-wing sympathisers was discovered, which indicates that the press has trust issues with right-wing voters.

“As might have been expected. The fact that the phenomenon is not seen by people on the left is, of course, because they themselves do not suffer from constant angling and bias”, Sweden Democrat MP Jonas Andersson tweeted.

​“Perhaps not so strange that we on the right prefer to have direct unfiltered contact with our voters via social media instead”, Moderate MP Jan Ericson tweeted.

“In an environment where the identitarian left takes over the newsrooms, isn't it natural that words like Indians, Cowboys, and Eskimos are getting banned from the broadcasts?”, his party colleague Lars Beckman mused on a recent development.