Reply: Journalists shape how people perceive reality

Johan Lundberg rejects Peter Wolodarski’s accusation that his account of Dagens Nyheter’s reporting on Roma registers promotes conspiracy theories. In this reply, Lundberg says critics of the newspaper’s agenda-setting journalism have repeatedly been dismissed as conspiracy theorists or far-right extremists.

He also disputes Wolodarski’s description of his background. Wolodarski had linked him to the Timbro think tank, Lundberg writes, although he says that is incorrect. By Wolodarski’s own standard of argument, Lundberg says, the claim could therefore be described as a distortion of fact.

Lundberg acknowledges one omission in his book, “Rikslikaren.” He agrees that, for the sake of completeness, he should have included the 2017 appeals court ruling that followed DN’s investigation. But he says the ruling should not be treated as confirmation that the newspaper’s handling of the revelations about the Roma registers was beyond criticism.

That handling is central to Lundberg’s argument. He says the book examines how a powerful media actor sets the agenda through selection and framing, as well as through the interaction between news reporting, cultural coverage and editorial writing. His underlying thesis is that journalists shape people’s view of reality and, in doing so, influence what the public considers important.

Lundberg asks how shortcomings in journalism’s basic functions affect public debate and, ultimately, democratic decision-making. He points to the media’s role in making relevant social problems visible and enabling rational, open discussion about them. In the case of the Roma registers, he raises hypothetical questions about tensions between individual privacy and policing linked to crime associated with families of a particular ethnicity, and about how cultural practices should be handled alongside family-based enclaves with parallel systems of justice.