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Of course, I don’t say it out loud, because I know it’s prejudice. I made a report in Bergsjön and spoke with a man about a guard who had been brutally beaten by a gang. His explanation: they were day laborers who were placed in an area where the only day laborers who sometimes come to visit are the police, the bailiff and the guards.
My thoughts and your thoughts are a reality that we never talk about. They are in Sweden and spread mistrust, fear and divide the country. Perhaps the hidden camera is the only possible way to portray this in such a brutal, battle-ready way that it moves us all.
Secret recordings It is in many ways a treacherous working method with traps that can be devastating to our journalistic credibility. It is defensible as a method of work when it reveals abuses of power, high-level hypocrisy, and gross misconduct.
I have used hidden recordings several times during my years as a journalist. But I remember a conference between tireless reporters in the United States in the late 1990s where I ended up in a heated debate with American colleagues. I thought they used the method in time and out of time. An example was shown at the conference that I found disgusting and unpleasant. A journalist chased a drunk black woman with a hidden camera.
At that time, I formulated some ethical requirements. In order to legitimize the hidden recording, it is necessary that the usual completely open methods are excluded. That what we can reveal has great dignity. And finally that we use it against people in some form of position of power.
It certainly prevails divided opinions if I’ve always managed to measure up. But I want to say that the polling station report that I did twenty years ago revealed hypocrisy on the most important issue of the elections. The political representatives said one thing to the media and another to the voters when they did not know they were being recorded. More examples: Ruthless landlords selling black apartments. Stormy ICA Maxi owner who cheated with meat. City officials bribed. All of these we mercilessly strip naked on television.
But the method is questionable. Just showing a person in a hidden recording becomes a “gangster” of the person in question. The shaky camera and blurry images automatically make people think that something dark is being developed.
Once TV4 asked me to do a one-hour show every two weeks with a hidden camera. I said no. To end up in a situation where we have to rebroadcast something questionable to fill a recurring show would be devastating.
Two shows that have used hidden technology recently are “Mullvaden” on SVT and “Borat 2,” which was released just in time for the US election. The revelation in “The Mole” of how North Korea operates as a behind-the-scenes terrorist state is a remarkable and almost unlikely achievement.
Sacha Baron Cohenaka Borat, appeared to expose Donald Trump’s attorney (and former New York City Mayor) Rudolph Giuliani as a dirty old man with a hidden recording. But if one carefully dissects the images, it is rather Giuliani who is subjected to abusive treatment. But it is insidiously cut so that viewers believe something that didn’t happen.
Perhaps the time of the “hidden camera” is over. The president of the world’s largest democracy, Donald Trump, is just as crude and brutal “on the record” as he is “out.” It is a new era. Now it is said that what was previously kept hidden from live television cameras.
