by johan

I have no idea who Andrew Rosenthal is, but he's either consciously misrepresenting the conflicts surrounding Bulletin, or, more likely, he's been lied to by the owners.

“They call themselves liberal conservatives, but American terms are useless in Sweden,” Rosenthal says, likening them to centrist Democrats.

Even by American standards, their views and rhetoric are much closer to Trumpism and Breitbart than centrist Democrats and New York Times.

According to Rosenthal, some of the controversy at Bulletin stemmed from how it covered the country’s COVID-19 approach—rocking the boat with a position that Sweden should have followed international medical guidelines, rather than embarking on its own strategy.

This critique was already mainstream, many editorial pages have been holding the same views on the pandemic response for the past year. Bulletin was launched in January this year. The only controversy around their COVID-19 coverage that I've seen has been that the person they kept sending to the press conferences on the topic was not a journalist. Rather than sending someone from the news desk, they kept sending one of their opinion columnists who didn't ask questions and instead derailed the events by trying to debate the officials present. They replaced this columnist two weeks ago.

At the top of his to-do list is instituting an adequate division between news and opinion, an ethos Rosenthal was brought up in. “My father,” he said of the late Times executive editor A.M. Rosenthal, “was batshit crazy about the separation between news and opinion.

This was one of the issues that caused the previous top editors to quit: the owners demanded full control of journalistic texts, publishing texts themselves without going through the editor responsible.

Rosenthal will be running the show remotely from his home in Montclair, New Jersey—a suburb teeming “with about 300 other journalists,” he joked—and doesn’t see much of a difference between working with the local weekly there via Zoom, as he’s been doing, and managing journalists in Sweden using the same technology.

This is hilarious when one of the complaints from the people who quit recently was it was impossible to reach the top executives during the day since they all woke up late in the afternoon after spending the night (shit)posting. When asked at noon about what the executives had said when he resigned, the last editor in chief said he did not know since he was probably still asleep. "Is Tino awake yet?" trended on Twitter for a day.

Good luck, Andrew!