I was dragged along. I became like everyone else. These are the central concepts in Åsa Linderborg's story about the text she wrote on 5 December 2017, which led to her being blamed by the Media Ethics Committee (MEN) for having "grossly violated good journalistic practice".
This is extremely serious criticism. Many meta-publications have been rejected by MEN, but only two for gross violation of good journalistic practice and only one that includes the head of culture at one of the country's largest newspapers. Linderborg duly left the post of cultural director in the summer of 2019.
Then she sat down, we now understand, to write a thick diary novel that will wash her deed free from guilt.
"I was carried away," she writes in one of the diary's moments of self-examination. "I became like everyone else."
She was dragged along, she also repeats in the interviews, and then she happened to write that regrettable thing about Benny Fredriksson.
Memory is short in the media eddy currents of our time . But the reality is still real. It would be deeply regrettable if Åsa Linderborg's historiography gains ground.
In her story, Åsa Linderborg has the role of leading critic of journalistic abuse under metoo. A piece of art considering that she herself was responsible for one of the most gross trespasses.
As in all great illusion tricks , the scam takes place right in front of our eyes: in the claim that she became like everyone else - which by the way is an infamous smear of all other journalists, publicists and debaters who reported on #metoo and its transformative significance without grossly breaking against good journalistic practice.
Linderborg's basic stage image is, like the illusionist's, a delusion.
It was not "everyone else" who wrote that Benny Fredriksson forced an actress to have an abortion. It was Åsa Linderborg, with the cultural director's entire journalistic weight. The publication cannot possibly be described as that she was "dragged along" in something that was already going on in other journalistic media. When she wrote it, she did not become "like everyone else", on the contrary, she stood out from the herd.
Violations were made in many places, name publications that would never have been made under normal circumstances. But no one as extreme, and as controversial as the one Aftonbladet and its cultural director were convicted of.
It was stupidly written. No talk about it, even Linderborg admits it.
Then the washing starts.
Åsa Linderborg has written something stupid. The simplest explanation is she was simply wrong, thought crookedly. But she does not want wrong. So the source of the error must be somewhere else, when it now became as wrong as it became.
To calculate her equation - with the axiomatic value Åsa Linderborg = is right - she must attribute a negative value to metoo. More nuanced in the thick book, more unambiguous in the short interviews that reach many more. But by and large: metoo was not a good liberation movement, it was a kind of madness. Then it redeems itself:
Metoo was a bad thing . She fought alone, but staggered once, she was dragged along and became like everyone else. Now that the battle wounds have healed, she continues the fight.
A story that swings, undeniably, but it is not true for that.