As someone already mentioned, I think it’s a generational thing. Younger people weren’t into the party politics of their predecessors and the society as a whole simply got tired of politicizing everything. And then of course there was that whole thing with the disappearance of the Soviet Union.

“And another question – When people accused YLE of being leftist back in the day, what did they say? Did they admit this or deny being leftist?”

Well, I guess the problem was that they didn’t have to. Pleasing the Soviets was seen as so important in the times of finlandization that critique was kept subtle.

The same as now:
JG:
YLE is quite independent of the government and is reasonably unbiased in its coverage as far as I can see.

BTW: Yesterday, after the results were clear, Ropponen said that “they [YLE] had asked last week from people that if Niinistö loses what is the main reason”, and the answer was “his stand on NATO”. This was part of the same opinion poll, which they gave out before their last TV debate on Thursday. This poll was reported to the public in
this form. Can any of you saying that YLE was not biased towards Halonen (and left in general) give me a good reason why anyone without a motive of influencing undecided voters would do this type of reporting? Especially, after this issue was already the main tool of Halonen’s forces against Niinistö.

Besides, total left-wing bias was required, if you were a Moscow correspondent or handled Soviet Union otherwise in your story. If you were not in line on the former, the soviets would have kicked you out of the country and on the latter, Kekkonen would have send a myllykirje to your boss for breaking the orthodoxy of foreign politics. If some group in the parliament got pissed off, your boss would slap your fingers and tell you to improve your act.

Up into the 1980s the hard-line faction of the Communist Party had a good deal of influence in Parliament: this was partly due to their ability to get their supporters to make maximum use of the proportional representation system through tactical voting in marginal constituencies. As fervent supporters of the Soviet Union, they were also able to intimidate the other political parties with the Moscow card. The other main group this unholy alliance was the Centre Party.

Arguments critical of socialism were heard, but they had to be worded in a manner that would not give any reason for the Soviet Embassy to take offence. If someone in the media “went too far”, the hard-line communist newspaper Taudinkantaja – excuse me: Tiedonantaja – would write an op-ed piece lamenting that there are people in Finland who still want to sabotage the hard work of those striving for good relations bewteen Finland and the USSR. This piece then would be quoted by Pravda. Many journalists erred (considerably) on the side of caution to avoid the hassle.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the political and moral bankruptcy of its Finnish clients, there has been a certain amount of soul-searching in the whole Finnish media about the time of Finlandization and the accompanying self-censorship about topics that might have been caused offence among the people in the Kremlin and their Finnish lap-dogs.

So what changed this? When and how did YLE become un-left? And another question – When people accused YLE of being leftist back in the day, what did they say? Did they admit this or deny being leftist?

You’ve got a point there. I never started reading newspaers or newsmagazines till I came to Finland.

Okay, so YLE has traditionally had a somewhat (it’s not the days of Reporadio anymore) leftist point of view. That was in general a result of the even otherwise over-politicized days of the 60’s and 70’s when even school children were propagated to get involved into “class room politics” and the stalinistic so-called “taistolaiset” were very active. A lot has happened since then – former communist Björn Wahlroos is now one of richest men in Finland and the “red YLE” is pretty much a thing of the past.

MTV3 (or just plain MTV, as it was known back then) had pretty much the Centre party to thank for getting the right to broadcast their own news in 1981 (especially the left disagreed the idea of bringing competition to YLE which had a monopoly in TV news up to then). That appreciation showed at least before in the way they handled certain rural stories and Centre politicians.

Erkko apparently has certain ties to the social democrats. I’m not sure if he really is a member, but on the other hand his grip on the SanomaWSOY group isn’t that strong any more either. Then again there have also been studies made, that show that for instace Helsingin Sanomat often seems to support whoever happens to be in power, not necessarily the SDP. And by saying “support” I of course refer to the editorials as Hesari is a liberal paper in the sense that they have always allowed different opinions on their pages, both from interviewed people, guest columnists and even staff reporters.

All in all, what I’m trying to say is that sure there are a lot of different biases out there and some decisions are probably made on political grounds, but it’s still not enough to label a certain media outlet as partisan or biased. As for most of Hesari’s, MTV3’s, Nelonen’s or even YLE’s journalism, I think it’s clear that most of it is produced under journalistic guidelines, i.e. they are at least trying to be as objective as possible.

There will always be a few bad apples, but journalism is also a field were someone is always unhappy with the results and every little thing often gets interpreted as a show of support for one party or the other even though the journalist himself only tried to ask questions he saw as interesting and relevant.

Yle also produces high quality programs as long they’re not politically linked.

However, I think SanomaWSOY is even more biased, probably due to the fact that Erkko is an SDP member. With Nelonen it can’t be noticed very easily because their program content is made up mostly of entertainment. Hesari’s bias is very clear, you can tell it straight by just reading their editorials.

Then there are two nation-wide commercial TV net-
works pouring the Hollywood shit into our homes
night after night.