Skip to footer
Honesty
The Monitor's View

The Swedish way of truth-telling

A target of foreign disinformation campaigns, Sweden has become a model for dispelling lies with facts.

|
AP
Iraqis raise the Muslim holy book outside the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad during a June 30 protest against the burning of a Quran in Sweden.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

To save its democracy, Sweden is trying to prove truth can fly faster than a lie.

In recent weeks, officials have repeatedly said Sweden does not condone the burning of holy books, such as the Quran, even if it has granted permits for such public acts as a constitutional right. They have, for the first time, named Russia as the source of false narratives online about Sweden being hostile against Islam. And since last year – when Sweden experienced its largest disinformation campaign ever – officials have pointed out that someone with links to the Islamic State group was behind false reports that Swedish social services were taking children from Muslim families to Christianize them.

Sweden has lately become a role model for such quick fact-telling. After Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, it set up a lie-squashing body last year – the Psychological Defense Agency – just in time to counter a campaign aimed at preventing its entry into NATO and turning the Islamic world, especially Turkey, against Sweden.

“I believe truth will win in the long run when you have free debate,” the agency’s spokesperson, Mikael Östlund, told Deutsche Welle last week. The issue, he added, is to ensure an open debate.

The task of the new agency is to counter foreign sources of disinformation, not information generated inside Sweden. “We try to take action against malicious disinformation and propaganda coming from abroad that tries to change our view of reality, our voting behavior, our everyday decisions,” Magnus Hjort, the agency’s acting director general, told the German news outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“Nothing and nobody prevents people from telling lies,” he said. “But we will do everything to expose these lies as lies.”

The agency does try to educate Swedes on ways to discern facts from fake news. But it also presents “correct and verified information ... in a way that makes it possible for people to think through their choices and make informed decisions,” according to the agency website. By laying a groundwork of truth, Sweden hopes that lies find no place to grow.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to The Swedish way of truth-telling
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2023/0815/The-Swedish-way-of-truth-telling
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe