In 1993, when I became the head of culture at the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, I felt like a link in a century-old tradition. The daily press performed a role that justified its existence and made it a national concern. Above all, the major daily newspapers were at the centre of Sweden’s democratic and intellectual infrastructure. As a reader, almost twenty years later, I think about questions like these: what were the functions that supported that task and role? Which of these functions were fulfilled on the cultural pages? Do the cultural pages still fulfil those functions? Or have these functions become homeless? Have they moved somewhere else?

Like the practitioners of the past, one should, no matter what it is about, be careful with comments that claim higher insight. There is an imminent risk of using an old, invalid map for more current situations. The pace of change in most organisations is high. The publishing industry that I began working for almost ten years ago, for example, has little resemblance to the industry I now stand ready to leave. My reflections on cultural journalism, which I made when I started working in the publishing industry are, in other words, no longer relevant. It is as a reader I ask my questions, make my observations and draw my conclusions.

In turn, I’ll try to say something about three of the cultural pages’ tasks and functions: first, as a forum for ideas and views. In line with the centuries-old tradition, news and views had become separated in the newspapers. Views fell within two departments: editorials expressing the newspaper’s opinion, and the cultural pages, where views could be weighed against each other. The practice was, of course, patchier than the ideal vision but, with regard to this vision, there was significant consensus.

Nearly twenty years later, the cultural pages have lost much of their status as discussion forums, at least in terms of their exclusivity. With the advent of the internet and generally simplified and cheaper productive technologies, the number of discussion forums has become legion. The major morning papers’ cultural pages are still important to initiate debate, but they are no longer the only means of conducting, controlling and hosting the debates that they’ve started. As soon as Bengt Ohlsson, in Dagens Nyheter, asked whether cultural life is necessarily left wing, there popped up posts and opinions on thousands and thousands of public forums.

That the number of discussion forums has become legion can naturally be viewed as a benefit to democracy, and this is certainly true to some degree. Developments in countries with poorly functioning democratic and intellectual infrastructure (compared with Sweden) have shown that one of the things modern technology has made possible is uncontrolled messaging that can give rise to and drive political and social change. But here, at home, in such quiet and stable conditions – have we lost something? Has democracy at the same time made a loss? Two problems stand out:

First, a lack of sorting; a debate without a centre, one that takes place everywhere and anywhere, letting everything exist at the same level. One that tries to mobilise arguments stands side-by-side with the one who just exposes emotions and often prejudices. Nobody gives the former a greater weight in relation to the latter. Often, it seems that, in the area of ‘linking’ and ‘liking’, it has even become the opposite. Feelings and prejudices can be seductive and are therefore effective in attracting supporters. These mechanisms are threatening – and this is a crucial point – the sheer quality of public discourse. The emotional storms that can be constructive in a totalitarian state risk being destructive in a non-totalitarian one. If unreliable and ad hominem arguments are as valid as judgment and moderation, the community-forming exchange of ideas is impoverished.

There is also a lack of profiling. The dialogue between the cultural pages with different writer-profiles has stalled. The pressure for consensus seems to have become huge, as if all permanent or regular employees in this diverse group desired to be entrenched in one-and-the-same bastion. Fundamentally, one writer’s opinion rarely differs from another’s. Most are content with officious, pale contributions and meta-comments. Instead, one circles like a vulture over the desert of words, ready to crack down on those who fail to comply with the prevailing etiquette. While the debate in the discussion forums is in danger of impoverishment, it threatens to stop the debate on the cultural pages, which could die in an irrelevant consensus. (In a peculiar way, the cultural pages’ metamorphosis reflects politics. The party system has largely been phased out, and has been replaced by ‘election corporations’ that bid for the management of the state, and which are limited in their views and compliant to the dominant opinion.)

The second of the cultural pages’ roles that I want to address is that of knowledge provider. When I, a very long time ago, was admitted to the graduate program in comparative literature at Lund University there were the professors Carl Fehrman and Staffan Bjorck. Both had a parallel role as writers for Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter respectively. They belonged to a generation of humanists who had not yet succumbed to the international professional journalists’ unread anonymity. As scientists, they produced no career-advancing waste paper, but books for an educationally interested public, with suggestive titles such as The Poet and Death and The Novel’s World of Form. As newspaper employees, they informed about what was happening within their subject area. Fehrman joined Svenska Dagbladet with reviews of works such as Emil Staiger’s DieKunstderInterpretation and Charles Dédeyan’s Le thème de Faust dans la littératureeuropéenne. Every teacher was able to follow the development of their subject by reading their daily newspaper; every citizen was able to stay informed about broad fields of knowledge.

With an accelerated speed in recent years, popular culture has supplanted both the educational and reflective culture on the cultural pages. The Eurovision Song Contest and Sing-Along at Skansen are now obviously more relevant than new discoveries of our day such as Emil Staiger and Charles Dédeyan; this transition can be seen in the genre repertoire on the cultural pages. Articles focused on the person have become more and more numerous. Faces have become more important than substance. (Should a representative of the educational and reflective culture happen to be noticed, he or she will confirm the common assumptions that characterises the culture pages’ mainstream perceptions, not problematise them and certainly not question them. Or will it be a question of a prize or anniversary, but not a new thought or insight. Prizes and anniversaries are recognisable news for a modern cultural journalist, but not new ideas or insights.) Feature articles and columns have become more common, reviews fewer.

Obviously, the transition from the educational world and reflective culture to popular culture can be read in what is reviewed. The priorities of the weekly themes are evident: Anna Wahlgren’s daughter speaks out about her childhood, and hey presto! there are untold column inches of feigned benevolence and thinly veiled malice. Zlatan Ibrahimovic shares his wisdom to an alienated ghostwriter, and the whole sea of columns immediately goes into a storm. The contrast that can be observed with the reception of books that can broaden one’s knowledge and strengthen one’s reflectivity is huge. In the autumn of 2011, Swedish translations of two monumental and innovative studies of traumas of the 1900s were released; cognitively and intellectually they were the year’s most important volumes: Karl Schlögel’s Terror and Dream. Moscow in 1937 (tr. Peter Handberg) and François Furet’s The End of an Illusion. An Essay on the Communist Idea of the Twentieth Century (tr. Per Magnus Kjellström). Yes, to talk about the contrast as regards the reception could almost be considered misleading, because Schlögel’s and Furet’s books were given absolutely no reception when they came out.

Now can anyone argue that non-fiction literature, aside from Fehrman and Björck, has always been poorly covered in Swedish journalism? And this is certainly true, though it does not preclude what was bad from getting worse. I recall an approximately decade-old study by a German media scholar. She compared the current cultural pages of the time of Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet to the German papers Frankfurter AllgemeineZeitungoch and SüddeutscheZeitung, including with respect to the number and type of reviews. The number of book reviews of the overall culture was, according to the survey, about the same in all four papers. Of the book reviews, the proportion that was about fiction – and this is the point I want to emphasise – in the German newspapers was about 30 percent, in Svenska Dagbladet about 60 percent and in Dagens Nyheter about 90 percent.

In light of such figures, it seems understandable why the public debate in Sweden, is characterised by knowledge-phobia to the extent that it is. Here, learning is habitually referred to as ‘dusty’. The interpretations of our time as they appear on the culture pages are consequently generally flat. The past that could provide relief to the present is an unknown land. Yet one can understand the games of power politics surrounding Iran’s nuclear weapons, the psychological tensions within the EU arising from the debt crisis in several member states or the relationship between Fredrik Reinfeldt and Carl Bildt far better with the help of classical texts than merely on the basis of today’s so-called analysis. Machiavelli’s discourses on Titus Livy and Guicciardini’s comments on Machiavelli’s discourses – words expressed in the field of political science experiments that Renaissance Italy offered – for example, are excellent vantages points from which to assess contemporary politics. For me personally, I feel sad that things have become so bland from the grandstand.

The culture pages, to some degree, still function as an opinion forum. However, they have essentially lost their function as a knowledge provider; the de-academisation and de-intellectualisation have been too radical for anything else to be possible. Individual editors and writers who still do the little that can be done, of course, deserves respect, but the overall trend, and its nearly completed outcome, one cannot be mistaken about.

The third of the cultural pages’ roles that I have in mind is as a prop of civilisation. My entire thesis rests on the notion that newspapers’ primary role is as a part of the democratic and intellectual infrastructure. It is a thesis that has been strongly articulated, not least in the great federal democratic model far away to the west. On the stamps from the United States one can read variants of this message: ”A Nation of Readers”, ”The Ability to Write – A Root of Democracy”, ”A Public That Reads – A Root of Democracy,” ”Liberty Depends on the Freedom of the Press”, ”Our Republic and Its Press Will Rise or Fall Together ”, and so on.

Popular culture’s triumph on the culture pages reflects a transformation: media companies today are primarily businesses. Even the culture pages are made with a ‘customer focus’. One wants to publish things that please a wide audience, responds to this perception of reality and world view, which stills this curiosity: is the new Camilla Läckberg as exciting as the last one? Will Bear Ranelid saying something outrageous in the next episode of the Stjärnorna på slottet? (Stars in the Castle) Is it true that the Swedish Academy eats pea soup in Den Gyldene Freden (The Golden Peace) every Thursday?

The shift in the culture pages is not regarded with concern but favour with politicians, those who should champion the defence of the democratic and intellectual infrastructure as a major concern. The minister for culture (The Moderates) does not hold a cultural view, but perceives culture as an industry and wants to stimulate cultural practitioners to do the same. Stockholm’s cultural councillor (The People’s Party) is fighting against the term bourgeoispoliticians and acts as if culture has the same driving force as party politics, to collect as large a crowd as possible, and reward it with a populist cultural institutions that subjugate themselves to this view. The distance from the message on the U.S. stamps is breathtaking.

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Culture is not seen, either in the culture pages in Swedish newspapers or among Swedish cultural policy makers, as an activity whose purpose is to provide Swedish citizens with analytical tools and concrete reference materials when it comes to staying oriented in time and space, in fact in human existence, to find role models who can encourage the individual to develop spiritually and in the willingness to consider and understand. As an industry, culture’s purpose becomes entertainment and financial revenue. Of course, culture has always had an economic side, but this has never been the defined and admitted primary goal.

The value base for observation in the culture pages, in this widespread and fundamental shift, is becoming something other than it was just now. A person who has public success becomes interesting, for example, a writer who sells in large numbers, often representing mainstream perspectives, and representing widespread positions and delusions. Jan Guillou, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson weave dramatic intrigue around a stereotypical and politically determined perception of reality. And each of us should reflect about the deeper meaning of the priceless sight when success-admiring conservatives applaud these three men’s leftism.

Not everything was better before. The common domestic coverage in the major daily newspapers has become less comprehensive, but in its approach sharper and more creative. So carefully scrutinised is it, for example, that in Roman law it was called ”selfish management” with great care. On the cultural pages, by contrast, it has been lost, which is galling. Due to the editorial focus of attention, the intellectually innovative has disappeared, along with knowledge we don’t already have, views we have not yet considered, problem areas in which we have not yet trodden, sharp observations that take effort to assimilate and evaluate, yes, the seriousness that is necessary to its function of supporting civilisation.

The fact is that today even the use of an expression like ‘civilisation prop’ can be adventurous. One risks getting unwelcome support from forces that hate, above all, what they perceive as foreign. But Jimmie Åkesson in costume with breeches has no roots in Western individualism, which has given birth to the idea of ??the open society. According to this idea, no account is given to whether someone is black, yellow or white, man or woman, Jew, Muslim or Christian. Distrust is strong against thinking based on collective identities and collective representation. One does not want to know about clan societies. The individual has his/her rights and obligations as an individual under the law. It is such obvious givens that likely to erode when the culture becomes a branch of industry and the cultural pages an amusement park.

In my imagination, I sneak a peek through the door of a publishers’ meeting. What do I hear? Endless tirades about the economy, technology, and, besides that, nothing. As if Herbert Tingsten at a similar seminar in 1953 or 1957 would then have continued to focus on the quality and price of paper from different suppliers, the varying darkness of print ink, and the impression too much greyness could make on potential customers. For the rest: the head of a TV channel that finds it meaningful to discuss the quality difference between on one side Let’s Dance and, on the other side, Mothers & Mini-Models; and the head of a tabloid newspaper that is pressed to say something about content-related aspirations shows a PowerPoint presentation with a few empty phrases that could have been formulated by Goofy or Mark Levengood. O tempora, o mores!