Paris, what is wrong with Swedish public television?

Yesterday, Friday the 13th the first reports in Swedish press started appearing around 11 p.m. well after the attacks seem to have started, 9:30 pm, It took another one and a half hours for the first extra inserted broadcast to appear in the Swedish SVT2 television channel and it seemed like the news crew had to scramble called in from their Friday nights at home or amusements. On the main channel SVT1 the Madonna MDMA concert was sent starting at 11 p.m. just continuing without any prompts announcing the developments in Paris. At SVT2, two persons finally appeared, a relatively unknown news anchor and more name-worthy reporter. The reporting was haphazard and the images from the scenes were from French television not commented nor translated. No Swedish foreign reporter, correspondent on site even if the Swedish television has a large budget for this and virtually at least one in every one of the worlds largest nations capitals, Swedish television even has a weekly soap called the "Correspondents" a phenomena that seem to have changed the foreign correspondents role from reporting into acting.

So what is going on? I have been living enough long to be used an almost instant and excellent reporting from the hot-spots of the world and with Swedish correspondents doing the reporting from the actual sites. I have learnt that Swedish public television still have a large budget and staff of foreign correspondents living abroad but I have also seen the reporting start to falter like yesterday. The reporting from Paris was more of a farce than a professionally executed news-cast from a disaster zone, with the news anchor calling acquaintances living in Paris asking them, "what do you feel right now" or "what do you see from your window" even though those persons were living away from the centers of events. Some terrorist experts were called asked stupid questions like, "do you see similarities with earlier terrorist attacks" while the situation in Paris still was ongoing with nobody, not even the police at the scene having a clue of what was coming down on Paris. When called confronted with questions like this, the Swedish terrorist expert, Magnus Norell, laughed back to say, I am not saying anything as we do not what is happening over there, several times.

This "similarities with other terrorist attacks" question came up several times with different terrorist experts, Mumbai and Madrid was mentioned but not 1 single time the recent terrorist attack in Oslo, orchestrated by the national Anders Behring Breivik. Is this a symptom of media treating this horrendous atrocity with silence as being politically correct? Considering Behring Breivik not as a terrorist but a mentally ill person or not wanting to give him credits for being the most infamous terrorists of modern times?

This with no Swedish foreign correspondent at the scene makes me wonder, what was that person doing? Having fun, eating out or...? Not even answering calls from the Swedish news-room?

I recently wrote an article on war-zone correspondents, "Homeland and 3 generations of war zone correspondents", trying to shed some light over why there is so little information coming out of zone's of conflict trying to show what "embedded" reporting has done to journalism. Well, the bigger capitals of the world cannot hardly bee seen as war zones not even with an escalated level of terrorism and neither be seen as affected by the "embedded" thing.

I am asking again, what is wrong with Swedish public television and where was the Swedish television's Paris correspondent yesterday?

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