At the beginning of 1998 Aftonbladet, the biggest newspaper in the Nordic countries, published menacing pictures of nazis with drawn pistols outside the homes of well-known Swedes. These publications inaugurated a long period of terror and intrusion for the people threatened, and a prolonged, serious crisis of confidence for the newspaper concerned and for Swedish media generally, the reason being that the pictures proved to be a fabrication, partly produced with assistance from the newspaper’s own staff. They had not been taken as part of a scheme for killing anyone, nor even primarily for the purpose of intimidation, but above all to obtain publicity and picture royalties for the nazi group involved. The newspaper for its part had not bothered to investigate the veracity of the story it published, content perhaps to have got hold of a saleable item for its billboards and front pages.

When the police and prosecution service began to uncover what had really happened, the newspaper management counter-attacked with an aggressive press campaign in support of their own action. The nazis who had taken the menacing pictures were demonised, at the same time as aspersions were cast on the police and prosecution service, the message being that Aftonbladet alone was combating neonazism, despite heavy resistance from nazis and the judicial system.

The newspaper’s involvement in the fabrication of the nazi threats it had published conforms to a wider pattern. This is not the first case of journalists creating their own news. earlier in the 90s, Aftonbladet, not least, had published “disclosures” of more or less fictitious nazi or anti-democratic terror groups. Both the newspaper itself and media colleagues generally have been very reluctant to talk about these professional fabrications.

These media tendencies are disquieting, because journalism based on falsehood or fiction undermines public respect for the media and respect for freedom of expression. The example of Aftonbladet’s action in relation to publicity-hungry neo-nazis and a critical judicial system can here serve to illustrate mechanisms and motive forces within the media which do more to hamper than to help the struggle against nazism and racism. There are questions here which concern all journalism – questions concerning the daily work of most journalists.

The publishing history of the menacing nazi pictures was first seriously investigated by the journalist Dan Josefsson, who published a disclosure and a subsequently prize-wining feature article in the magazine ETC two years after these events had taken place1. A year later, in the autumn of 2000, I produced a radio documentary based on in-depth interviews with all those involved and on studies of pre-trial investigation reports, court judgements and back numbers of newspapers 2.

Where Aftonbladet was concerned, the story began during Christmas week 1997, when a young news reporter, Christofer Fager, was phoned up by a young neo-nazi who said that he was in the process of starting a neo-nazi group and requested the newspaper’s help in launching it. The reporter replied that the paper was of course interested in writing about new neo-nazi groups, but that in order to publish anything it also needed pictures. New Year came and went, and more phone calls ensued. Finally the young nazi – we can call him Stefan – suggested that he could offer Aftonbladet menacing pictures of well-known Swedes.

The reporter now contacted his chief news editor, Lena Anderfelt. Fager described the opportunity of getting hold of menacing pictures. At the same time he played safe by professing some apprehension of the nazis just trying to exploit Aftonbladet to their own ends.

In view of the delicate nature of the subject, Fager’s chief news editor in turn consulted the newspaper’s chief editor, Anders Gerdin. Go ahead, the management said. Get the pictures!

At Epiphany 1998 the reporter arranged to meet the young nazi at a Stockholm pizzeria. The nazi told him that he could now arrange threatening pictures. He asked to be given a few hours and told the reporter to stand by and keep in touch by mobile phone. Together with a couple of other young neonazis from the same circles, he then borrowed a hood, a teargas pistol and a camera and travelled by tube to the central Stockholm home of television programme compere Alexandra Pascalidou – who for some time had been away in the United States. Quick as a flash, two pictures were taken of a hooded nazi aiming a pistol at the door of Alexandra Pascalidou’s apartment. The nazis then made off back to the underground and phoned Aftonbladet’s Fager, who immediately drove off and picked them up by car. The nazis gave him the undeveloped film, and then they talked about money. The nazis asked how much they would be paid. No promises were made, but five-figure sums were mentioned.

At the same time the reporter asked his next question: could more threatening pictures be procured of a different kind of Swedish celebrity? Pascalidou – a mettlesome journalist with an immigrant background – being threatened by neo-nazis was not exactly news to the media. To lend added weight to publication, the newspaper really needed another threatened person to start the feature series with.

Could this be arranged? Several persons were mentioned in the discussions that followed, but the choice fell on the Stockholm Police Head of Public Relations, Claes Cassel.

The reporter drove back to the newspaper and got the lab to develop the roll of film. Chief news editor Lena Anderfelt was summoned to see the pictures for the first time. At this moment the whole story could – theoretically at least – have taken quite a different turn, because the chief news editor and other management staff consulted that evening had of course already begun critically scrutinising the statements made by the reporter and the nazis, because of course there was reason to ask why the nazis wanted Aftonbladet to publish their threats and threatening pictures. One might ask why the nazis had given Aftonbladet just a roll of undeveloped film and no prints. Could it be that there were no threatening pictures apart from the ones in Aftonbladet’s hands? Could it be that the pictures were intended for the newspaper’s consumption?

That the nazis were in the business of publicity, not threats? But no questions were asked by Fagers chief news editor or the newspaper’s chief editor. Instead these questions, which could already have been asked on Day 1, were to be chewed over for a whole year by three Swedish law courts, from first to supreme instance.

Today the newspapers chief editor, Anders Gerdin, the reporter, Christofer Fager, and others I have talked to at Aftonbladet maintain there was nothing odd about them asking so little in the way of critical questions. Death threats may be a serious matter, but then an evening newspaper “writes about war, violence and death every day”. The chief editor gave Fager, the cub reporter, the task of investigating the neo-nazis a bit more closely. After a couple of days’ phone calls the matter was considered not only settled but thoroughly accomplished, even though hardly a single one of the people who were phoned up had the least idea of what nazis these people were or what the whole thing was about. And in spite of several of the experts who were phoned up warning Aftonbladet not to publish on such flimsy grounds. Heléne Lööw, an expert on nazis, pointed out that it was common for young neo-nazis trying to make their way in the business to phone the press in a bid for bogus marketing for launch purposes.
There were more phone calls between Fager and the nazi Stefan. According to Stefan, Fager now wondered if money might possibly speed things up. Amounts ranging from thirty to fifty thousand crowns were mentioned. The reporter also told the nazi that he wanted the nazis to publish the threatening pictures on the web – freely available to everyone. This would have to be done before Aftonbladet published, so that no one would ask how Aftonbladet had got hold of the pictures. The nazis were to wait, though, until the reporter gave them the go-ahead.

After a week had passed, the nazis promised Fager that the threatening pictures of the home of police spokesman Claes Cassel were now also on their way. Without having seen any pictures, Fager wrote a dramatic, menacing article: “Here the nazi waits with loaded pistol outside Claes Cassel’s apartment. The police spokesman is threatened by a newly formed, extremely violent terrorist group.”‘We can liquidate Cassel – no trouble at all.’”

But it was another two days before two young skinheads had actually taken the pictures outside the Cassel family’s detached house. Fager immediately drove out from Aftonbladet and picked up the nazis. This time he himself had to extract the undeveloped film straight from the nazis’ camera.

The newspaper management now decided that it was time to publish. A number of pages in the newspaper were now emblazoned with claims that Aftonbladet alone could expose a new and extremely dangerous terror group -–NS Stockholm. The newspaper quoted one of the nazis as saying: “we can get him whenever we like” – a very serious threat, not least considering that Aftonbladet was still harbouring the pictures threatening Alexandra Pascalidou, without having laid a formal complaint with the police.

Today Anders Gerdin, Aftonbladet’s chief editor, says that the laying of a complaint with the police was never even discussed at the newspaper. Not even today does he see anything odd about this. One reason, he argues, is that the editors were justifiably afraid of someone in the police breaking news on their own behalf by tipping off a rival newspaper. And the potential loss of a good story was a price which the Aftonbladet management did not consider worth paying for reporting the matter to the police.
It is still hard to tell whether the Aftonbladet editors believed their own story of death threats by deadly dangerous terrorists. If in fact they exaggerated the threats and did not really believe there was any real danger, then this means that they almost lied in their columns and quite unnecessarily frightened a number of people half to death for a considerable length of time, added to which, they caused considerable wastage of police time and resources.

If they really believed what they wrote in the newspaper about murderers and terrorists, then Aftonbladet’s omission to lay a formal complaint with the police means that they simply did not care about the possibility of bloodshed.

In the event, the Aftonbladet editors kept the pictures threatening Pascalidou under their hat for a fortnight before publishing. According to the chief editor, they could have waited “far longer”. But two things happened which spurred them to action. Firstly, the nazis, tired of never receiving any money from Aftonbladet, phoned its rival, Expressen, offering the Pascalidou pictures for sale. This, according to Gerdin, was the crucial event which made the editors rush to print. The second thing that happened was that Pascalidou herself finally became available for interviews, after returning to Sweden from her long journey abroad. Aftonbladet confronted her on Saturday, 17th January with the giant blow-ups its photo lab had made from the nazis’ negatives, but she declined publicity and refused to be photographed or interviewed by the newspaper. Aftonbladet decided to publish the Pascalidou pictures regardless, but not until the Monday. On the Sunday the nazis published the threatening pictures on the Internet. On the Monday the pictures appeared in Aftonbladet.

The police were soon tipped off about NS Stockholm having published Aftonbladet’s pictures on the Internet for 24 hours. The nazis’ home page was traced to an American web hotel which helped the police to trace the pages from there to a computer in Stockholm. The subscription proved to be in the name of one of the skinheads’ fathers. The whole story was now slowly unravelled, and two-and-a- half weeks later the police arrested the skinhead who had operated the computer and the nazi who had been Fager’s informant.

In the course of questioning it transpired that Aftonbladet’s reporter had discussed payment for the threatening pictures and that money had probably been paid. The police also found that several pictures had been taken after money had been talked about and could thus be said to have been ordered.

Just over a week after the arrest of the nazis, Aftonbladet’s managing editor, Niklas Silow, was to debate the publication of the pictures with Claes Cassel, the police officer who had been threatened, at the Publicists’ Club in Stockholm. Prior to the debate, the reporter, Christofer Fager, e-mailed background information to his chief editor. Up till now the reporter had still not been pressed concerning the nature of his contacts with the nazis. Thus there had been no need at all for any “cosmetic surgery”, but now, for the very first time, Fager, the reporter, began telling lies. He claimed that the nazis had shown him prints of the threatening pictures when he acquired the first roll of film.
If this had been true, it would have meant the nazis having more threatening pictures in circulation, in which case it would be unlikely that the pictures had been arranged solely for Aftonbladet’s benefit. Meanwhile the police had tacked down and arrested all the skinheads who had taken the threatening pictures. The nazis revealed the whole course of events to the investigation team, who now realised that the journalist had been playing on the nazis’ need of money and publicity.

The prosecutor now had the reporter arrested as well. The Aftonbladet management now came to another crossroads. Either they could lie low, waiting to see what evidence the judicial authorities could bring against the reporter, or else they could intervene and try to steer events. The strategy they chose was to do everything in their power to divert media attention from what the newspaper had been doing and making it concentrate instead on how the judicial authorities were acting. The newspaper management now launched a press campaign, destined to go on for nearly a year, against the administration of justice, claiming that the issue of fact – whether Aftonbladet had helped to inflate the nazi peril and had frightened innocent people unnecessarily – was insignificant compared to the bare fact of Sweden’s judicial system interfering with a journalist’s everyday exercise of his profession.

According to Aftonbladet, the free word was threatened and this – not the newspaper’s own doings – should be the focal point of debate.

Although there were one or two highly critical voices to be heard, large sections of Sweden’s journalist profession closed ranks behind the embattled Aftonbladet reporter to begin with. On Aftonbladet’s debate page, Håkan Carlson, Chairman of the Swedish Union of Journalists demanded that the Prosecutor-General scrutinise the actions of the Regional Prosecutor. Press Ombudsman Pär- Arne Jigenius warned of the possibility of there having been an abuse of authority.

It was only now – at the eleventh hour, one might say – that the Aftonbladet management began asking the questions which perhaps they ought to have asked both themselves and Fager on the very first day. The first long crisis meeting took place a day or so after Fager’s release.

Then, on 2nd June, when criminal proceedings were filed against the reporter and the police pre-trial investigation report was made public, it dawned on the Aftonbladet management as well that perhaps the reporter had begun telling lies in some parts of his story and that the police might have a better case than Aftonbladet had been ready to admit. Even so, the newspaper continued casting aspersions on the actions of the judicial authorities, declaring that both management and reporter had perfectly clear consciences. It was not until the autumn of 2000, when I interviewed chief editor Anders Gerdin, that publicly admitted that he had begun to perceive the shortcomings of his own story, while outwardly continuing for some considerable time to impugn the judicial system.

With reference to Fager’s lies about never having promised any money and, moreover, having been shown any number of prints of the threatening pictures, the City Court acquitted him but convicted the nazis. The reporter, then, was supposed to have acted in good faith when claiming that the nazis really were that dangerous and that there really was a widespread threat to the people concerned. The case migrated through the courts until the Supreme Court finally acquitted all those involved, including the nazis, on the grounds that the nazis had taken their threatening pictures for the sake of money and publicity. In other words, the court found that the pictures had been arranged for publication in Aftonbladet. This being so, the actions of the nazis were protected by the Freedom of Information Act and those of the journalist by the Freedom of the Press Constitutional Law. The fact of the pictures being menacing and frightening makes no difference. Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Constitutional Law does not prohibit threats and intimidation as part of a newspaper’s production process.

The lack of interest shown by the media in scrutinising their own working methods is doubtless due – as Aftonbladet’s chief editor himself points out – to there being nothing “unusual” or “remarkable” about the newspaper’s actions in this particular case: “the only problem was a reporter telling lies.” The media’s need for saleable “news” can be exploited, for example, by smart neo-nazis who know how to package their message attractively for journalists. The general absence of scrutiny of facts, expertise and time for reflection among the journalists themselves also plays into the nazis’ hands, of course. No doubt the silence of the rest of the profession on the subject also emanates from a more discreditable circumstance, namely that this was not the only time a news story had been faked. In all media enterprises there are instances of journalists and producers trying to improve on a good story.

Sometimes this “improvement” turns into sheer fabrication. Aftonbladet is not unique in this respect, but, sticking to our chosen example, this very same thing happened on a number of occasions during the 90s.

In 1991 the reporter Sigfrid Ennart – today chief news editor – “exposed” a secret nazi terror group which, he maintained, had at least a platoon of “soldiers” training in the forests of Sweden in preparation for armed attacks on Swedish society3. A picture showed masked nazis armed with AK 4 carbines. Careful investigations by the security police and the security service of the armed forces revealed that the armed “second platoon of the Stockholm branch” was actually a nazi officer on the army reserve who had borrowed a number of unloaded weapons from his barracks for a few hours and rounded up a few fellow-nazis for the photo call. According to the nazis who took part, they did it for the money which Aftonbladet allegedly paid them. The newspaper denies having paid them.

In 1991 another of Aftonbladet’s leading news reporters, Magnus Ringman, wrote a “revelatory” feature article4 about a violent vigilante group being formed in a small Swedish community and taking the law into their own hands because the murder of a local child had still not been cleared up by the authorities. A picture showed three people wearing hoods and sporting baseball clubs. After a time local residents reacted to the allegations and reported the feature article to the Press Ombudsman, whereupon the only demonstrable members of the vigilante group proved to be the owner of the local scrap yard, who was a bit of a trouble-maker, his son, and the journalist himself. It was these three who had posed for the big, threatening picture published in Aftonbladet. Nor was anybody else mentioned among the “vigilantes” interviewed in the article.

So long as the media silently acquiesce in working methods of this kind, there is every possibility of groups dangerous to the rest of society obtaining a public tribune with the aid of well-packaged messages. More seriously, the media’s carelessness with the truth and their lack of self-criticism undermine public respect for freedom of expression and for democracy with it. This makes the selfcleansing of the media a matter of the utmost urgency.

 

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1 Josefsson, Dan: “Aftonbladets förlorade heder”, ETC, Stockholm 1999. An updated version of the report can be downloaded from http://www.josefsson.net.
2 Lindquist, Bosse: Aftonbladet och hotbilderna, Sveriges Radio, first broadcast on P1, on 25th November 2000. The full documentary is currently available for downloading and listening at the Swedish Radio website, - http://www.sr.se.
3 Ennart, Sigfrid: “Vi drar oss inte för mord” (We won’t stop at murder), Aftonbladet 19th September 1991.
4 Ringman, Magnus & Mardell, Tommy: “När hatet kom till byn”, (When hate came to the village) Aftonbladet 30th June 1991.