Finland is a country that enjoys the greatest amount of press freedom, according to Reporters without Borders.
I suspect that one way that Finland has attained such a high ranking in the press freedom index is because politicians are not directly manipulating what the media should do and write.
A rude example of such abuse, however, is Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP Jani Mäkelä, who didn’t agree with what Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest daily, wrote about an interview with Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó.
PM Mäkelä wrote in a tweet that he demands and requires that Helsingin Sanomat corrects what they published about the foreign minister.
In the first place, Finland is not Hungary, where strongman Viktor Orbán has effectively killed press freedom. Mäkelä can bitch and cry all he wants but it is the newsroom that decides what is written in the newspaper.
Let’s hope that our country will never take Hungary’s path to create a country where the state censors and oppresses dissident voices.
With people like Mäkelä and parties like the PS, this would be possible if they held absolute power.
* The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13, 2017, into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. In the last parliamentary election, Blue Reform was wiped off the Finnish political map when they saw their numbers in parliament plummet from 18 MPs to none. A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.