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GOVERNMENT

The Swedish media and the ‘Tooth Fairy State’

A recent report admonishing Swedes about their dental hygiene prompts Swedish journalist and columnist Ola Tedin to reflect on how a sometimes uncritical media appears to serve the interests of the Swedish state.

Published: 25 May 2012 14:15 CEST
The Swedish media and the 'Tooth Fairy State'

“Nine out of ten Swedes don’t brush their teeth properly.”

The lead item on national public radio’s morning news on a recent Saturday focused on a perceived lack of awareness on the part of Swedes for their dental hygiene.

Apparently a survey had found that Swedes don’t put enough toothpaste on the brush, brush for too short a time, and insist on spitting out the suds too soon, depriving our teeth of much needed fluoride.

The tone could not be misunderstood.

In apparent awe, the producer of the programme let a dental hygiene expert from some institute go on lecturing about correct brushing behavior for a good two minutes, an eternity for prime-time radio.

The lack of follow up questions or the slightest hint of scepticism brought back memories of educational radio programmes from my school days as a young person growing up in Sweden and the campy news reels from the forties and fifties.

Sweden has a plethora of state-sponsored institutions, organizations and authorities bent on educating the populace towards a perceived better moral, physical and economic behavior.

The current centre-right Alliance government has trimmed at the edges of this massive bureaucracy, but has showed itself to be surprisingly tolerant.

Thus we are still showered with advice, guidelines and alarmist messages concerning more or less every angle of modern life.

Or rather, as the case is with the tooth brushing, well-intentioned advice that appears to be somewhat out of date.

After all, how can one fit the government recommended two centimeters of toothpaste upon the minimal head of the electric tooth brushes used by an increasingly large portion of the Swedish population?

According to organizational theory, if an organization is formed for a specific purpose, it will do everything it can to continue to fulfill that purpose.

Furthermore, the organization will likely try to maximizing the delivery of whatever is perceived to be the primary goal or intentions of the organization’s backers.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, is a perfect example, but Sweden’s National Institute of Public Health (Folkhälsoinstitutet) also fits the model.

By producing reports that raise awareness or concerns about public health, this agency helps justify its own existence.

And I’m fine with that.

After all, politics is the art of making impressions and forming opinions. And Swedish politicians in general, and social democratic ones in particular, excel in using the government apparatus to this end.

But I’d be more comfortable if some of this steady output would be a bit more critically treated in the media.

After all, these are the same journalists who take great professional pride in treating with the utmost scepticism a press release or some new report from any commercial entity.

And rightly so.

But the big mystery is why similar output is treated differently just because it is from a government organization.

As a long-time journalist, I know for a fact that media in Sweden is fiercely independent from government meddling, even at the state-funded public service media outlets Sveriges Television (SVT) and Sveriges Radio (SR).

And yet, take any official report or scientific survey that points to some perceived flaw in our lifestyle and you can be sure that it will be treated with a Pollyannaish lack of the exact same critical reporting that is assumed to be of great importance to help readers, viewers, and listeners to form informed and skeptical opinions on things affecting everyday life in other areas.

It’s not hard to imagine the media’s response if Colgate put out a press release telling the general public to use at least two centimeters of toothpaste twice every day.

Most likely total silence. Or, at best, ridicule.

Yet when an academy in Gothenburg says to do the same thing, it gets three minutes of prime-time on national radio.

No doubt this Tooth Fairy State has many Merry Little Helpers.

Ola Tedin has written opinion journalism for several Swedish dailies, including Sydsvenskan and Expressen. He was the op-ed editor of the Ystad Allehanda newspaper from 2001 to 2011.

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GOVERNMENT

Was Norway ill prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic?

A report from a Norwegian commission appointed to assess the country’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic has concluded that while the government handled the situation well, it was poorly prepared for the crisis.

Published: 14 April 2021 17:11 CEST
Was Norway ill prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic?
Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

The 450-page report was submitted to Prime Minister Erna Solberg by medical professor Stener Kvinnsland, who led the review.

The commission found that, generally, Norway had handled the pandemic well compared to the rest of Europe. That was in part due to citizens taking infection control measures on board.

“After a year of pandemic, Norway is among the countries in Europe with the lowest mortality and lowest economic impact. The authorities could not have succeeded if the population had not supported the infection control measures;” the report states.

However, the commission’s report also outlined that Norway did not properly prepare itself for the pandemic.

“The authorities knew that a pandemic was the most likely national crisis to have the most negative consequences. Nevertheless, they were not prepared when the extensive and serious Covid-19 pandemic came,” it said.

Prime Minister Erna Solberg said during an interview with the commission, conducted as part of its work, that the government did not have an infection control strategy of its own.

“We had a ‘we have to deal with a difficult situation’ strategy. We had to do everything we could to gain control and get the infection down. It was really only at the end of March (2020) that we found the more long-term strategy,” she told the commission.

Low stocks of personal protective equipment were another source of criticism in the report.

“The government knew that it would in all probability be difficult to obtain infection control equipment in the event of a pandemic. Nevertheless, the warehouses were almost empty,” Kvinnsland said at a press conference.

Norwegian health authorities were praised for the swiftness with which they implemented infection control measures. But the commission said that the decision should have been formally made by the government, rather than the Norwegian Directorate of Health.

READ MORE: Norway saw fewer hospital patients in 2020 despite pandemic 

The implementation of restrictions in March 2020 was critiqued for failing to ensure that “infection control measures were in line with the constitution and human rights.”

One-fifth of municipalities in Norway lacked a functioning plan in the event of a pandemic according to the report, and the government did not provide enough support to municipalities.

“We believe that government paid too little attention to the municipalities. The municipalities were given much larger tasks than they could have prepared for,” Kvinnsland said.

The report was also critical of Norway’s lack of a plan for dealing with imported infections in autumn 2020.

“The government lacked a plan to deal with imported infections when there was a new wave of infections in Europe in the autumn of 2020,” the report found.

“When the government eased infection control measures towards the summer of 2020, they made many assessments individually. The government did not consider the sum of the reliefs and it had no plan to deal with increasing cross-border infection,” it added.

The report also concluded that Norway allowed itself to be too easily lobbied by business when deciding to ease border restrictions last summer.

The division of roles in handling aspects of the pandemic was scrutinised in the report. Here, the division of responsibilities between the Ministry of Health and Care Services, The Norwegian Directorate of Health and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health were unclear.

The prime minister has asked the commission to continue its work.

“We are not done with the pandemic yet. Therefore, it is natural that the commission submits a final report. There will also be topics where the learning points can only be drawn later,” Solberg said.  

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