Analysis: "Newspaper publishers want less policy in media policy"

That Tidningsutgivarna says they want to "put down the press support" is a grossly misleading wording.

What they want is to reshape state support for the journalism industry - it is emphasized in particular in the debate article that TU's model would cost taxpayers as much as the existing support.

More specifically, they want to reshape it in a way that reduces the element of politics in media policy.

TU instead wants to spend the scarce billion on a general financial subsidy of the entire industry: VAT exemption and reduced employer contributions. 

TU thus wants the

state to make it cheaper to run news media, but lets the market and the companies shape the supply. 

Traditionally, press support is anything but market-based, rather the opposite.

Far back in the 1970s, the paper newspapers came into being to support newspapers that could not survive on commercial terms.

In the more schematic society of the time, it was considered a reasonable goal that each town had two newspapers: a bourgeois and a social democratic one.

The S-newspaper was often the smaller one, with lower advertising revenues.

An obvious point was that the national dominant Bonniers would not receive press support. 

Press support can

in many ways be said to be a deeply social democratic policy - it wanted to counteract the effects of capitalism, it kept alive for a long time a broad social democratic daily press, and it had its heyday in the 20th century. 

Nowadays, most things are different.

After a series of acquisitions in 2019-20, the Bonnier Group has become a giant player in the local press and rakes in 160 million in press support.

And the Bonnier group's masterpiece Dagens Nyheter - the country's archetypally dominant morning newspaper - now has such a low coverage rate that it would also receive press support if applied (the newspaper waives the 65 million it is entitled to, and is careful to communicate it).

Göteborgs-Posten, as dominant as it can be in Gothenburg, receives 38 million.

Among the local newspapers, it is now common for the same news paper to be published under two titles, each with its own editorial department, one S-marked and one bourgeois.

It is a poorer industry. 

TU is right

that the press policy issue is no longer how we should save the so-called second newspapers.

In 2021, it reads: how are we going to save journalistic media outside the big cities at all. 

Are the market and the media companies the best to solve this socially important task?

Or is political control needed ("democratic control" as they say on the left)? 

It is a matter of political faith.

Hopefully, TU's proposal can kick life into the right-left dimension of media policy, so that there will be a bloc political move in the issue - which is now, as in the 20th century, necessary to raise a political issue.