The Swedish-language department of Finland’s public service broadcaster, Yle, is again being forced to make cut backs to its offering.
Currently the main editions of the news bulletin programme ‘TV-nytt’ are broadcast at 18.15 and 20.00 (with a shorter 5 minute summary later in the evening on weekdays). The 15 minute long 18.15 broadcast has been established in that time slot since 1996. The 20 minute main 20.00 edition has existed since FST (Finland’s Swedish Television) received its own channel when digital tv started (previously FST existed as slots on Yle’s TV1 and TV2).
The latest cost cutting exercise means that the separate main 18.15 and 20.00 will be scrapped in favour of only one programme to be broadcast at 19.30. It will last 25 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of sport news. This is the same time as Channel 4 (Nelonen, a commercial channel) transmits its main evening news. There will also be a 5 minute bulletin at the crazy time of 17.25 which coincides with the Swedish language flagship hour long 17.00 radio news edition of Aktuellt on Radio Vega. The late evening edition of Tv-nytt will be extended to 10 minutes.
There is also talk of the Swedish language news department having to share the Finnish language news studio. This would be possible with these new proposed times (during which Yle doesn’t have any scheduled Finnish language news transmissions.) If this should go ahead, one must wonder what would happen in the instance of a crisis where TV-Nytt needs to stay on the air to cover a major event. Plus, it will inevitably lead to a watering down of the Swedish language news’ own identity on screen. The Finnish language news department is not going to tailor its studio to meet any specific needs of TV-Nytt. TV-nytt only just got a new studio, about 6 months ago.
The twice weekly in-depth current affairs analysis programme ‘Obs’ is also threatened by these cut backs; there is talk it will either lose one edition per week or disappear entirely. Apparently Yle’s excuse is that with a 25 minute long main edition of TV-nytt, there will be plenty of time for analysis already during that programme. This seems to be rather naive – not everyone wants to sit through indepth analysis during the main news. And with a loss of two bulletins which did have a slightly different feel (the 18.15 concentrates a little more on local events around Swedish speaking Finland), how will they fit it all in to the 19.30 if they are going to have to stuff in the in-depth stuff there too.
It seems the staff of TV-Nytt and Yle’s Swedish department are less than happy with the changes. According to Vasabladet, TV-Nytt’s news director Gunilla Löfstedt-Söderholm said she was concerned that the programme would lose viewers because of this as it’s not the same people who watch the 18.15 and 20.00 bulletins. “This is a sad decision. TV-Nytt has been transmitted around 18.00 since the 1960s. Establishing new habits amongst viewers takes many years”.
The savings also threaten Swedish Yle’s international correspondents. Although according to the director of the whole of Swedish Yle, Annika Nyberg-Frankenhaeuser, they will be retained. Personnel cutbacks are likely to hit part time employees.
All of this is very sad news. Especially coming so soon after Radio X3M (Yle’s Swedish language pop music/youth radio station) was saved from threatened closure after large scale public protests. Also, digitalisation promised us more domestically produced programming in Swedish with the greater amount of time available to broadcast through FST having its own channel. Now it seems that this promise is to be broken.
Pictures: Copyright Rundradion Ab. First:TV-Nytt studio with Gunilla Löfstedt-Söderström at the desk. From Svenska Yle’s webpages. Second: from programme ‘Obs’.
19 comments
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Wednesday 28.5.08 at 19:17
JL
Adjustments like this are welcome as Swedish language programming already takes up a vastly disproportionate amount of Yle’s budget (around 15% I think). Last time when Yle made budget cuts two Finnish language channels (tv and radio) got slashed while the Swedish channels were saved, so FST should do more to balance the budget. Another thing is that FST5’s viewership is tiny; apparently many Swedish-speakers prefer Yle’s Finnish language service, and few Finnish-speakers ever watch FST5. Is it is right to waste license payers’ money on an SFP pork barrel?
Wednesday 28.5.08 at 21:32
Jonas
Which radio station got slashed? They proposed to close down Radio Peili if I remember rightly, but they saved it along with Extrem. Yes, Yle Extra closed down, but that was not really watched by anyone. Of course, Swedish speakers watch Yle’s Finnish services. Especially those in Helsinki and Uusimaa anyhow. Very many in particularly Österbotten don’t. But why is it that Finnish speakers can’t watch FST5? They can happily watch programmes in English, German, Spanish etc with subtitles? Do their heads explode if they have to watch a programme in Swedish? FST5 makes Finnish subtitles available after all.
Svenska Yle does not account for 15% of Yle’s budget. I think it’s around 10%. Remember though, when they published the statistics of tv licence payments by municipality, it was the Swedish speaking areas that had least evasion. So you could also say we pay, on average, more per head into Yle. Plus, we pay the full fee, not 6% of it, so we should get 100% quality of service, not 6%.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 0:34
JL
You’re right about Radio Peili, I remembered incorrectly (I never listen to radio). According to this article they just cancelled the plan to broadcast it nationwide.
Yle Extra had as much viewers as FST5 (google for finnpanel statistics for proof), even though I think it had less programming per day. The reason that neither Finnish-speakers nor Swedish-speakers watch FST5 is probably that its offerings are not very good.
Yle supervisory board member Lyly Rajala has said that FST takes up 16 percent of the Yle budget. Swedish-speakers certainly do not pay their tv licenses three times more often than others, so your claim of them paying more per head is irrelevant. About 2.5% of Finnish residents have neither Finnish nor Swedish as mother tongue, and their numbers are growing fast. They generally do not get Yle (or any) services in their mother tongue, and I don’t think it reasonable for small minorities to expect to get services in their own language like the majority population.
It’s just that Swedish-speakers in Finland are used to the idea they are entitled to a larger share of public funds than their numbers would suggest. Yle’s financial problems would be over if FST’s funding was cut down to a reasonable level, like 5% of the total budget.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 12:55
Egan
JL: why don’t Finnish speakers watch FST? If Finnish YLE is blowing money on pointless foreign language stuff like snatching HBO from Nelonen, why should they be allowed to make up the shortfall by dipping into the FST budget?
You seem to be arguing that Swedish speakers should be punished for being bilingual (’they watch Finnish services so don’t *need* FST’). That’s an incredibly small minded and depressing point of view.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 14:44
TH
Yle pays one million euros per year for HBO shows, which is a miniscule portion of the budget, so your point is a red herring. I’m not arguing that Swedish-speakers should be punished but rather that they should be treated equally with Finnish-speakers. But some people seem to be more equal than others in Finland.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 14:46
JL
The previous comment is from me.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 14:53
Rasmus
“why don’t Finnish speakers watch FST? If Finnish YLE is blowing money on pointless foreign language stuff like snatching HBO from Nelonen, why should they be allowed to make up the shortfall by dipping into the FST budget?”
I think many normal Finnish speakers do watch FST. Bettina S has comments in Finnish on her home page. Strömsö is one of Yle’s most popular shows. But HBO shows with Finnish text are ok for the types like JL. But should they have to hear the Swedish language, they become all intolerant and develop an inferiority complex. The same happens if they have to listen to passengers speaking Swedish on the tram or bus. That’s the sad reality.
But anyway, I actually don’t think it’s so bad that TV-nytt will move to 19.30. 18.15 is early for me, time for making dinner. Half hour programme is better too. They can cover the full news. And for the people worrying it will have to compete with Nelosen uutiset, are they serious? It’s not exactly award winning journalism to compete with.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 16:00
Egan
One million euros is not ‘nothing’, especially if you are going to use the relative viewing figures of FST and YLE to support your argument. YLE took something that was already shown, and popular, in Finland, and outbid a commercial organisation to show something in a foreign language. And now, the fact that this proven commercial success is more popular than FST’s Finland-produced output is going to be used by you as ammunition to eliminate more Swedish programming! If that’s how they spend their money then they don’t deserve a bigger slice of the pie.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 16:37
Rasmus
JL, TH: This is exactly about equality, you are right there. You can’t provide a television channel on a shoestring. Then really nobody would watch it, because the quality would be nothing. Maybe stick the tv-nytt news desk outside in the parking lot and have candles for light and film it with a mobile phone camera? Or maybe the presenter could just read out STT to the camera? Where would the equality be there? You seem to be arguing that Swedish speakers should be less than full members of society in some way.
We are all Finnish, we have to support all of our society, not just the majority and not just the minority.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 16:43
JL
“But should they have to hear the Swedish language, they become all intolerant and develop an inferiority complex. The same happens if they have to listen to passengers speaking Swedish on the tram or bus. That’s the sad reality.”
Why is it that when you try to discuss the absurdities of language politics in Finland, some Swedish-speakers will immediately try to shout you down as suffering from “inferiority complex”, being mentally ill or lowlife scum etc.? I have nothing against Swedish-speakers as people, but I’m a supporter of democracy and equal rights and an opponent of all privileges. For that reason I will continue to speak against policies that unfairly favor small minorities and put the majority at a disadvantage. I would like Finland to treat minorities in the similar way as Nordic countries and the West generally do.
Egan, Yle buys HBO stuff to get a bigger share of the total viewership in order to justify the tv license (a disproportionate share of whose proceeds go to producing Swedish language programmes). However, Yle’s Swedish offerings have been lavishly funded and unpopular long before Yle acquired HBO shows, so your point is bunk.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 16:54
Rasmus
Who said you are mentally ill or scum? Certainly signs of an inferiority complex though. As you just said, you are “an opponent of all privileges”. So, that obviously means you think that the Swedish speaking Finns are some how extra privileged by having the same rights as the Finnish speakers. If you thought Finnish speakers and Swedish speakers are equal (which they are, and that’s how it should be), then you wouldn’t be saying that one of them was over privileged!
It’s just solidifies the equality by providing media in these languages by what is, after all, the public service broadcaster. It’s especially there to provide the breadth the commercial sector is unable to. Remember, the Finnish speaker has media from lot of commercial channels and radio stations too. The Swedish speaker basically only has Yle when it comes to broadcasting. If X3M has been closed down, that would have been it for youth radio in Swedish. If YLE X closed down, there would still be multiple music stations in Finnish on your radio. But public service is also important for Finnish speaking young people.
Finland has a much better record in its treatment of language minorities than the other Nordic countries. Why you would want us to sink to a lower level of equality and tolerance is hard to understand.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 16:55
Rasmus
Who said you are mentally ill or scum? Certainly signs of an inferiority complex though. As you just said, you are “an opponent of all privileges”. So, that obviously means you think that the Swedish speaking Finns are some how extra privileged by having the same rights as the Finnish speakers. If you thought Finnish speakers and Swedish speakers are equal (which they are, and that’s how it should be), then you wouldn’t be saying that one of them was over privileged!
It’s just solidifies the equality by providing media in these languages by what is, after all, the public service broadcaster. It’s especially there to provide the breadth the commercial sector is unable to. Remember, the Finnish speaker has media from lot of commercial channels and radio stations too. The Swedish speaker basically only has Yle when it comes to broadcasting. If X3M has been closed down, that would have been it for youth radio in Swedish. If YLE X closed down, there would still be multiple music stations in Finnish on your radio. But public service is also important for Finnish speaking young people.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 17:00
Rasmus
Sorry that came twice. Wireless internet issues.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 17:05
Egan
It’s a very, very poor justification of the licence fee. It doesn’t encourage or promote Finnish culture or media, it doesn’t bring new programming to Finland, and it pushes up the price Finnish viewers will have to pay in future. It’s an extraordinarily bad decision for a public broadcaster to make and if it is in any way symptomatic of their decision making in general then i wouldn’t lend them 50p to buy me a cup of tea.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 17:27
Jonas
It’s always going to be a disproportionate spend per head. That’s the price one pays for the level of equality Finland has with its progressive language laws. It’s much more enlightened than in many places. Why we would want to lower our standards to that in the other Nordic countries, I don’t know. Although, in fairness, they don’t have a national minority of the same size as here. I know some Finnish speakers on the right (especially Soini’s gang) try to draw a comparison with the Finnish speaking immigrants in Sweden, which is rather tiresome. Why stear Finland’s language policy with what goes on in Sweden. It’s almost as if he thinks somehow Swedish-speaking Finns have a responsibility for what Sweden’s government does.
Think of services in Sami, there are less than 2000 people registered as having Sami as their mother tongue, but I would never argue against depriving them of their right to police services, schools etc in Sami in northern Lappland. They are an original population group.
Equally, it’s crazy to try and measure the success or societal worth of Svenska Yle’s (or Finnish Yle’s) offering by employing listener or viewer figures. FST is never going to get a million Swedish speaking viewers, because there aren’t a million Swedish speakers. The offering of FST5 is actually quite good considering its limited resources.
I personally support public service strongly – in both languages. But in a sense, public service is even more vital for Swedish speakers. It’s overly simplistic to think that whether it’s 10% or 15% of Yle’s budget, it’s only for 6% of the population. FST programmes in Swedish have subtitles in Finnish available, just like those HBO programmes on TV1 and TV2.
I for one certainly have no problem at all with 85-90% of my tv fee going towards services in Finnish. And please remember, whilst it’s easy to say if you’re sitting in Helsinki that all Swedish speakers are bilingual – that is not the case everywhere and amongst all age groups.
PS. I think there is a problem with WordPress just now. It’s taken me 3 attempts to log in to my blog now to make this comment. Egan, I have deleted your second double comment (maybe due to this problem). Rasmus, I haven’t deleted your double comment, because they are actually slightly different!!
Thursday 29.5.08 at 19:46
JL
Egan, I don’t think Yle should spend its money on HBO shows either, but like I said, that issue is beside the point in this discussion.
Certainly signs of an inferiority complex though. As you just said, you are “an opponent of all privileges”. So, that obviously means you think that the Swedish speaking Finns are some how extra privileged by having the same rights as the Finnish speakers.
If someone protests at being treated differently by the authorities because of their race, sex, language or religion, is it a sign of “inferiority complex”? I don’t think so. The issue here is justice. (I await the day when people cease using Freudian/Adlerian/whatever garbage concepts like “inferiority complex” in attempt to browbeat their opponents.)
Whether Finland’s language policy is “progressive” and “enlightened” is a matter of perspective. The status of Swedish in today’s Finland resembles that of Russian in Cold War era occupied Soviet Republics (e.g. Estonia) and Eastern European “people’s democracies” (like Poland). I know that back then there were people who thought that these policies (like all the things the Soviets did) were great, but I’d be surprised if today’s SFP voters had the temerity to assert that the forced Russianization of the occupied nations by the Soviets was “progressive” and “enlightened”.
Now, I don’t know what you think about the Soviet Union, but personally I think Finns should be worried if their laws are more like those of the Soviet Union than the Western nations. With the fall of communism, the ex-communist nations all rolled back the Russianization, but unfortunately in Finland the privileged status of Swedish, which is in many ways a legacy of the WW2 and the Cold War, was not normalized.
Swedish-speakers in Finland have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. In no other (democratic) country do similarly small minorities expect to be treated in linguistic matters as if they were the majority. Instead of speaking Finnish or using interpreters, Swedish-speakers demand that the 95% majority learns Swedish. If you do not grasp how absurd this is–economically, culturally, morally–I don’t know what to say. Most Swedish-speakers have a more or less fluent command of Finnish, and I don’t see why the state should indulge those few who refuse to learn Finnish–it’s as sensible as if the state gave free booze to alcoholics.
The fact that FST gets a disproportionately large share of Yle’s resources reflects a general trend. Everywhere in the public sector more money (relatively) is used on Swedish language services. This is particularly pronounced in education and health care. I do not see why the Finnish-speaking taxpayers should subsidise the lives of the Swedish-speakers–it might be justified if the Swedish-speakers were a poor, historically downtrodden minority, but they are anything but. Svenskfinland should be maintained by the civil society, not the state.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 20:11
Rasmus
Making a comparison between Swedish-speaking people in Finland and the Russian speakers that the Soviet Union moved into places like the Baltic States is completely wrong and shows the mind of an extremist at work. Only such a person could make the connection. The Russians in Estonia and the other Baltic States came about because of an occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. In many parts of the country populated by Swedish speakers, the Swedish speaking population predates any significant population by Finnish speakers. So, if we use the completely strange logic of you, the people of many villages in Nyland, Österbotten and Åboland should be depriving Finnish speakings of their rights? Obviously a crazy suggestion. But it shows the oddness of your argument. Somewhere like Esbo/Espoo was almost entirely Swedish speaking in 1900. Does than mean that the majority of Finnish speakers who live there now are “an occupation” and forcing Finnish language on the area? The suggestion is mad and lacks common sense but can be inferred from the logic of your argument.
I agree with you entirely however, that people should not be treated differently according to language (or race, sex, religion, etc). That is why it is important services are available regardless of language. That’s the foundation stone that Finland’s language laws are based upon. That you have the right to receive services in your mother tongue; Finnish or Swedish. Of course the cost is always going to be slightly more per head for Swedish speakers, and indeed Sami speakers. Then again, if you go to municipal services in a Swedish speaking majority district, they will cost more per head of Finnish speaker. So what? It’s a price worth paying for that goal you have correctly identified as being so vital: Equality.
Swedish speakers do not have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. But if you view that we are over priviliged, it would seem this way I guess. We are far more likely to be the ones who speak Finnish to a Finnish speaking person – very often, even if they are in a majority Swedish language municipality or if the group is 9 Swedish speakers and 1 Finnish. Your complex is again evident where you state that Swedish speakes are anything but a historically downtrodden minority. I agree, we are not downtrodden. But we are not more priviliged either. We don’t seek that either. All we want is equality. And that’s all the law entitles us, and that is all it should.
I am glad you have revealed your true colors though, with statements such as “I don’t see why the state should induldge those few who refuse to learn Finnish” etc. It makes a mockery of your earlier “I have nothing against Swedish-speakers as people”. Perhaps you forgot to finish that sentence with “as long as they don’t actually speak Swedish”.
Thursday 29.5.08 at 21:25
Skäribo
I do no know why the problem is so big around the time change 18.15 to 19.30. It does not matter that the Four News is at the same time. FST is better quality to watch. I think TV1 tvUutiset at 18 pm is more competition to the 18.15 tvNytt. So it is good that they move it to 19.30. But it is true, it is hard to remember when to turn on the tv when they move things around so much.
And again, some Finnish speakers moan about this and that. And some Swedish speakers moan also. What’s new. Never possible to make everyone happy. I think most Finnish speakers have been very good in our history to us. There is 200 members of parliament, so if any of them are telling us that Swedish speakers control everything I normally think of that. Out of 200, there has never been 101 SFP delegates. Most Finnish speakers don’t have problems with us. Just a few that are sadly very loud. Loudness is not equal to popularity!
Friday 30.5.08 at 1:06
Anonymous
19.30 is not a good time at all for us with small children. Right in the middle of Bolibompa on Swedish TV1. So I guess we will be getting out news from SVT next year. Dum. These people that decide so clearly live in Helsinki, so out of touch with the rest of the country.