Orwellian Big Brother monitors journalists of Finland's Public Broadcasting Company Yle

The Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat heard from a long-time journalist of the Finnish Public Broadcasting Company Yle that it is problematic for them that his articles feature "too many heterosexual men". When asked about this, the Ilta-Sanomat journalist discovered that our publicly funded media records not only the gender, age, skin color, and social status of interviewees but also what kinds of thoughts or bodies they have.

Subsequently, Yle's editor-in-chief Jouko Jokinen tries his best in the Ilta-Sanomat article to explain away the image of the company’s operations that the interviewer—and ultimately the reader—might have formed. The article also reveals that Yle systematically collects statistics on the content of journalists' articles.

These are "basic things that can be automatically identified by text analysis and whose tracking is ethical. What topics we cover, how they are geographically distributed, who are the most interviewed individuals, what gender they represent, what the most used titles are, which political parties are most frequently mentioned, and so on."

And finally, the development manager of Yle then—perhaps unwittingly—reveals that "we are trying to diversify our content. Nowadays, we discuss a lot in our editorial offices, for example, whether it is always privileged people who speak for us. There are many underrepresented groups that do not have a voice in society."

In other words, confirming that our tax-funded media operates like an Orwellian big brother, whose duties include collecting data based on which even long-time Yle journalists can be presented with "ratings on the table" if they have interviewed people from so-called underrepresented groups too infrequently.

After reading the article, I was left wondering if such an Orwellian big brother is really the kind of service that Finnish taxpayers want to fund. Or perhaps they would prefer that the money be used for something entirely different—either within Yle or in other sectors of society.

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