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Journalism must be able to handle opinions, facts and ideas, not avoid the problem
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This is a cultural article which is part of Aftonbladet’s opinion journalism.
Photo: TT
For one day, on December 6, Greta Thunberg was editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter.
What an activist does Who gets the chance to choose the largest morning newspaper in the country in one day? Do all the journalists with the wrong attitude leave before their morning meeting, hire new ones with the right attitude before lunch, and publish a newspaper full of the right ideas before the day is out? Or spend the morning reading everyone’s texts and the afternoon correcting them so that the printed newspaper conveys the Right Message?
No, maybe not. It’s kinda hard to see Dagens Nyheters cleaning of Greta thunberg as editor-in-chief of yesterday’s newspaper as more than a gesture, a clever publicity stunt: look, do something! Yes, look, you do. But the question is why. And at what price?
A few days ago, Thunberg revealed that his newspaper would not contain any opinion material. Without leaders, without discussion articles, without chronicles. “I have no problem with people expressing their opinions,” he explained. “But when it comes to the climate crisis, opinions often outweigh knowledge.”
Yes when the world Climate policy is dictated by figures like Triumph Y Bolsonaro it’s easy to agree. At the same time, there is something deeply disturbing in this simple division: opinions on the one hand, intuitions on the other. Why should someone with such an insight into knowledge go into newspaper publishing? Scientific journals already exist, often freely available online for those who are interested.
But DN readers consequently had to do without Peter Wolodarskis Y Björn wimans Views on Sunday this weekend. Not surprisingly, the magazine is also free of car ads (the day before it was fifteen full pages), with the exception of one, which advertises that BMW is best for the weather. The Center Party has also bought a page, there Annie Lööf take “climate action.” Facts too, I guess.
Part A contains a couple of clever reports on the specific effects of warming on the Kola Peninsula and Sápmi. Jonas Fröbergs Norrlandsskildring highlights the flip side of electrification that today’s politicians believe should solve everything: electrification requires batteries, which contain coveted metals, which presuppose devastating mining … A mining representative speaks for once: “It’s a huge intervention in nature and the operation must take place in 30 years. ” It’s excellent, but both here and elsewhere in the paper I lack a political angle. Why not ask Annie Lööf why the tax on mineral deposits (two per thousand of profit) is so provocatively low?
Is that an opinion? Or an idea? Or facts? If you ask me: a mix. It should also be the job of journalism to deal with such mixes, not try to avoid them.
A large part of Part A is taken up by graphs, statistics, and diagrams on carbon dioxide levels, temperatures, and energy use, interspersed with images of genre like crunchy clay soil or a lone koala in a fire-ravaged forest. Sometimes it feels like reading my favorite childhood book. Is that how it works, although more boring.
It amazes me that DN often has an annoying tendency to explain things to the reader. Preferably in the form of dots, with arrows and simple pie charts with huge numbers. This is probably where you will end if you believe that truth equals facts and opinions are different from perceptions. In the cry of men disguised as journalism.
That’s an attitude which is both tactically and epistemologically dubious. Of course, facts are important when it comes to climate, but without opinions, horizons of interpretation and political context, they are nothing. It may be a fact that humans, as DN claims, have exterminated 680 species of vertebrates since the 16th century, but it is also a fact that a warmer climate makes new species flourish. (See biologist Chris D. Thomas Book Heirs of the Earth.) The Paris Agreement goal of a maximum warming of 1.5 degrees may be necessary, but the fact is that the temperature of the atmosphere has fluctuated much more than that during the history of the planet.
No, basically I want nothing more than Greta in these matters; I just want to say that your belief in the facts is counterproductive. The problem, says Greta in a conversation with David attenborough, is that people are not informed, so it is important to communicate with the information. Isn’t that what party leaders say today? Attenborough sees a more complex situation ahead: “Democracy is the least bad way to govern, but it’s still pretty bad. I mean, how do you get 60 million people to agree on a particular measure? It is very difficult. “
Yes, exactly: tar political aspects are taken into account it is it’s hard. But it is not unexpected that the political is quite toned down from DN’s perspective. The consequence is that the “crisis”, however serious, almost seems to be a purely technical issue. Like the housing crisis, but worse. Something we can fix if we just “do something”.
Or as Margaret Atwood encouraging concludes his essay in the cultural section: “It’s time to choose. And then if life is your choice, it’s time to act. Or not. It’s up to you. “I wonder if the liberal ideal of freedom of choice has ever wavered so falsely. Interestingly, earlier in the essay an almost opposite thought is formulated:” Human life on earth did not last forever. ” is there something liberating about simple intuition?
At the end of the magazine it is in the usual order “Inside”. This time around, psychologists are answering weather-related questions. How do you deal with your weather anxiety? The answers are contradictory, though Christian ruck lands on a thought similar to Atwoods: “We are all going to die, but not now. So even if there is a threat, we live in the here and now. ”
Is that an opinion? Or an idea? Or facts? If you ask me: a mix. It should also be the job of journalism to deal with such mixes, not to try to avoid them.
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