Swedish Radio Censured - Its Pro-Wind 'Local' Sat on a Wind Firm's Board

SWEDEN - Swedish Radio wanted to show that people in the countryside like wind turbines. It found the perfect local. It just forgot to mention that he sits on the board of a wind power company.

Now the state broadcaster has been censured by the Swedish Broadcasting Commission, the regulator that polices impartiality and accuracy on radio and TV, for breaching the requirement of accuracy.

The story aired on 3 June on Swedish Radio's local station P4 Kalmar. It covered a survey showing that people in rural areas were more critical of new wind farms than people in the cities.

Instead of talking to the sceptics, the station went looking for a rural resident who was happy with the turbines. It found Niklas Petersson on the island of Öland.

The piece ran under the headline "Niklas likes the wind power near his home - tries to get them into his pictures". Petersson was presented as an ordinary countryside resident who had no problem with turbines close to his house.

Board member at a wind company

Shortly after the story went out, it emerged that Petersson is a board member of Ventlinge Vind AB, a wind power company. That fact appeared neither in the radio segment nor in the online article.

When Samnytt exposed the omission in the summer, the editor in charge at P4 Kalmar, Rasmus Björe, admitted the newsroom had got it wrong.

"This was simply wrong. It wasn't good, and that is why we have chosen to unpublish this article," he said at the time.

Deleting it was not enough

The Broadcasting Commission now rules that the board seat was an essential fact, given what the story was about. Leaving it out made the report misleading.

The station pulled the article and published a clarification once it learned about the board seat. The regulator says that does not change anything.

"The fact that Swedish Radio chose to remove the publication and publish a clarification does not change the Commission's assessment," the decision states.