Darkness Over the Media Landscape

Chesterton makes this into a defence of tradition and of a backward-looking approach that involves ”giving votes to the most obscure of classes: our ancestors”, and to some extent refuses to submit to present-day values. That Axess Magazine devotes an edition to death appears, at least in the Chestertonian sense, logical given the siding with tradition that has been a thread running through my six-year chief-editorship that ends with this edition. It is my firm view that tolerance and open sensuality is seriously stimulated and tested in confrontations with thinking of the past. There may, of course, seem to be a paradox embedded in the fact that it is only with understanding and empathy of the conditions and thought patterns of earlier times that we are tested in our acceptance of the fundamentally different and alien.

Unfortunately, developments in this regard seem ominous. The obsession with the present and its values ??is reflected not least in the Swedish media landscape, which in recent times has come to be dominated by an increasingly sagely moralising attitude towards cultural expressions from the past. In some sense, one can of course say that this development reflects the similarity of attitudes that can be found in the university world, where one, not least within the humanities, has devoted considerable energy to pointing the finger at historical writers, philosophers and artists, who at least on the surface reproduce their time bias and anachronistic notions – just as writers, artists, and philosophers throughout the ages have been doomed to do, to a certain extent. Also in this case there may be reason to again recall some words from Chesterton, namely his observation that ”without education there is an imminent risk that we may take educated people seriously”. But, aside from the ominous trends in the academic world, there is reason to fear that the recent, increasingly growing dichotomy between the journalistic and academic spheres will fuel rather than undermine the present-focused ”arrogant oligarchy”.

When I began my journalistic path more than two decades ago, as a literary critic at SvenskaDagbladet’s cultural section, I, as the new writer, was requested as a kind of entrance exam to write a lengthy cultural piece. At the institution in Uppsala, where I at the time was a graduate student, there were also more longstanding employees at the SvenskaDagbladet’s cultural section, for example, Thure Stenstrom and Gunnar Brandell; the latter was both head of the cultural section and the Paris correspondent of the newspaper, and later during his time as a literature professor he was renowned for dictating extended cultural texts to a department secretary, while he, chain-smoking, walked back and forth in the staff room. In addition, the department had several writers at the cultural sections of Expressen, DagensNyheter (DN) and UpsalaNyaTidning.

As Lars Lönnroth (who himself has a background as a literature professor and head of the cultural section of SvenskaDagbladet) points out in an article in this issue of Axess Magazine, this kind of multifaceted graduate is now in short supply. On Svenska Dagbladet’s cultural pages, most of the writers who have academic connections have been let go. Only a few of the literary critics who have been retained have written a full cultural article. In his recently published book about DN’s cultural section, The Culture Page. Cultural Journalism in DagensNyheter 1864-2012, Åke Lundqvist says that a similar trend has characterised DN over the past decade. However, it should be said that the break with writers with academic connections there has never been done in the same systematic and brusque manner as recently in the former ‘intelligence paper’ SvenskaDagbladet.

To the extent that Axess Magazine has had some meaning in my years as editor, it has, I think, been as a counterweight to this trend. Partly, of course, we could parasitise on it, in the sense of the need for a platform where one does not succumb to current trends, and the time-bound values ??have increased for each step that major newspapers have taken in the opposite direction. At the same time, it is clear that we have failed in the sense that the Swedish development has in no way been stopped or even met a form of organised resistance. But the fight is, on the other hand, perhaps not over yet.