Oddly enough, the Washington Post chose to illustrate a story about life in Scandinavia with a photo of “Miss Denmark” Mette Riis Sorensen in a Tokyo shopping mall. (photo: Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty)
When you see a piece in elite US media headlined “Why Denmark Isn’t the Utopian Fantasy Bernie Sanders Describes,” you probably have a sense of what you’re in for. And the Washington Post’s November 3 article delivered, with a piece centered on an interview with a British journalist who’s written a book that purports to go Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia. Naturally, proving a place is not Utopia is easy work.
Michael Booth tells us the weather in the Nordic countries is “appalling,” the languages “impenetrable” and the food “awful.” But presumably linking the piece to the US election means we’re actually supposed to take it seriously. So it does matter that, as Dean Baker notes (Beat the Press, 11/4/15; FAIR.org, 11/5/15), the article’s pronouncements about Scandinavian societies contain actual misinformation.
For example, the Post’s interviewer, Ana Swanson, points to a “lower proportion of people working” as a worrying sign for Denmark’s economy and its model—though Denmark’s employment rate is far higher than the United States’.
What about relative income equality, free universities, parental leave, subsidized childcare, and a national health system? That just sounds good, Post readers are told:
In Denmark, the quality of the free education and health care is substandard: They are way down on the PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] educational rankings, have the lowest life expectancy in the region, and the highest rates of death from cancer. And there is broad consensus that the economic model of a public sector and welfare state on this scale is unsustainable.
You won’t be shocked to hear that on both those educational rankings and life expectancy, Denmark is well ahead of the US. And there’s no evidence presented (or requested) that that “broad consensus” exists anywhere outside of Booth’s head.
So by the time you get to the claim that information on Denmark’s public spending “is kept deliberately opaque by the authorities,” though Baker was able to find it quickly on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s website, you’ve got the point. The Post doesn’t want you getting any silly ideas about looking elsewhere for economic or social models, and if conveying that requires misinforming readers, so be it.
Long ago, 1963 or 64, there was an article in a Colorado Springs, CO newspaper about Sweden which had identified drunk drivers as a cause of many auto accidents. The Swedish government instituted a severe penalty for drunk driving. The article went on to say something like, “Well what can you expect from a socialist country like Sweden. Of course they have a lot of unhappy drunk people driving around. Thank goodness this is the capitalistic US, and we do not have that problem.” It took MADD beginning in the 1980’s decades working state by state to bring about stiff penalties for drunk driving. DUH!!!!!! I can’t stand to estimate the 10’s of thousands of deaths and severe injuries due to US blindness of the fact of the effects of drunk driving. The media appears to be dedicated to keeping the public ignorant on this and even more important issues.
There is broad consensus that the purchase of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and avoider of taxes, turned what might once have been an “elite” newspaper into the preferred wrapper of fish that it is today.