For 120 years, Helsingin Sanomat has always been wrong...
From the outset, Finland's largest newspaper has been criticised from all sides and on all subjects
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By Teemu Luukka and Esa Mäkinen
On Monday of this week, Helsingin Sanomat marked up 120 years in existence, celebrating the event with a new look to the print-paper that is likely to infuriate as much as it draws compliments from readers.
There is nothing very new in this: the newspaper has been receiving brickbats from every conceivable direction ever since the liberal Päivälehti, Helsingin Sanomat's predecessor, first saw the light of day on November 16th, 1889.
The list of detractors is long and varied.
RUSSIA
Päivälehti, which existed until 1904, was regarded by Finland's Russian overlords of the time as a dangerous publication, since it promoted the strengthening of Finnish nationalism at a moment when Imperial Russia sought to put a leash on the Grand Duchy's autonomous status.
The Russian authorities suspended the publication of Päivälehti four times in its short life and eventually in 1904 the interruptions turned into a permanent stopping of the presses, shortly after the paper carried an editorial touching on the assassination of the Czar's Governor-General Nikolai Bobrikov.
Päivälehti's founder and editor-in-chief Eero Erkko had been sent into exile already in the previous year, being described as "one of the more significant fomenters of a clandestine insurgent movement and the spreader of underground literature".
Erkko spent time in the United States and Cuba, and returned in 1905, by which time Helsingin Sanomat (which first appeared under this name on July 7th 1904 - just four days after Päivälehti got the axe) was up and running. He took over as editor-in-chief shortly afterwards.
POLITICIANS
If Finland's Russian overlords in the years prior to Independence did not take kindly to Helsingin Sanomat or its earlier incarnation, Finnish politicians in the years after 1917 have been no more cordial towards the paper.
The left has branded the paper as excessively rightist and the right has accused it of having a left-wing bias - and every party has sought at one time or another to put together conspiracy theories about the newspaper's intentions.
In particular the influence of the principal owner Aatos Erkko (Eero's grandson and the newpaper's editor from 1961-1970) on individual articles sparked much speculation, and even today some still stubbornly see his hand in editorial policy.
Relations between the Erkko family and the liberal National Progressive Party became strained in the 1920s and 1930s, when the politicians believed the Helsingin Sanomat owners were concentrating too seriously on making money.
Within the parties of the right and in the rival newspaper Uusi Suomi (1919-1991), Helsingin Sanomat came in for a good deal of critical tut-tutting in the 1950s and 60s over the paper's liberal stance on advertising, which even brought - shock-horror - condom advertisements (!!) onto the pages of Hesari.
Those on the right felt the paper was too "commercial". At the same time, Helsingin Sanomat has also long been blasted as a craven mouthpiece of the Social Democrats.
At the end of the 1960s, the Finnish Left came up with the rhyming couplet "Springer-Erkko, porvarien verkko" (Springer-Erkko, the network of the bourgeoisie), a sideswipe in the direction of the large German publishing house founded in the late 1940s by Axel Springer.
In the 1970s, the main thrust of criticism of Helsingin Sanomat came from the far reaches of the left, including the orthodox pro-Soviet tendency "Taistoists" within the Finnish communist movement.
These days the paper - and particularly its weekly supplement Nyt - is a popular target of critics who claim either that it is "green leftist" or "green rightist", but in any case point out that the paper is steadfastly down on all things connected with the Centre Party.
Among Centre Party supporters, it is a well-known fact that "the southern media" enjoy nothing more than baiting the Centrists at every opportunity.
The accusations of smear campaigns against the Centre Party and its predecessor the Agrarian League have been one of the most popular means of smacking down Helsingin Sanomat practically throughout the paper's history.
Another specific source of regular irritation in their time were the political cartoons on the masthead page by the late Kari Suomalainen (1920-1999, active with the paper over four decades from the early 1950s).
This was so even though it was well known that politicians of all persuasions were extremely tickled to be included in Kari's drawings.
In the later years, at the turn of the 1980s and 90s, the cartoonist was accused of racism over his politically incorrect drawings of Somali asylum-seekers.
BUSINESS AND INTEREST GROUPS
Companies and banks have from time to time complained that their voice is not sufficiently well heard on the newspaper's pages.
Back in the early days, the commercial banks were unwilling to offer loans to the paper, and in so doing sought to stifle it or to turn it into the mouthpiece of Finnish business.
Throughout its history, Helsingin Sanomat has stressed how important financial independence is for journalism.
It is not only the business magnates who have been angry: the trade union movement has barked loudly that the newspaper does not understand strikes and is fawning towards the employer side in labour disputes.
At the same time, for many in the farming community, Hesari is just one more steaming dungheap produced by those unsavoury types down in Helsinki.
"THE QUALITY POLICE"
The newspaper has been blamed at different times for being both overly showy and having an excessive whiff of "officialdom" and civil-servant-mindedness about it.
One rival editor-in-chief earlier this decade attacked the paper for being "permanently worried about everything" and unnecessarily keen to listen to everyone's grievances equally.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the term "historical almanac" was a popular barb at a time when the newspaper was accused of trying to write about everything under the sun and had relatively little in the way of op-ed material in its pages, at least relative to the situation today.
Staffers at Helsingin Sanomat have often been described as "alienated from real life" behind the glass and steel walls of the editorial offices, spending their time criticising the world from their ivory tower.
Lately the tenor of the style police's favourite slogans has changed, and the newspaper is more often accused of having gone depressingly "down-market" and sunk into "entertainment". To some extent this may be a result of the introduction of an entertainment section (in addition to "Culture") in the online edition.
There is in any event much wagging of fingers on the discussion boards whenever Helsingin Sanomat dares to mention anything about reality-TV, for instance.
EU SCEPTICS AND BRUSSELS FANS
Before the referendum on EU membership in October 1994, the Helsingin Sanomat front page (traditionally given over to advertisements with the exception of Christmas Eve - and, incidentally, on the day after 9/11) carried an announcement signed by the Finnish Newspapers' Association, urging the Finns to say "Yes" to the European Union.
This got EU-sceptics fired up and brought criticism that the paper was using its clout to force the nation into bed with Brussels.
In 1991, however, the newspaper published an EU supplement (or more accurately an EEC/Common Market supplement) that was headlined "The Last Decision of Independent Finland", and this brought out the pro-Europe lobby to attack the paper as anti-European.
ARTISTS
Practically all artists, regardless of artform or genre, are of the opinion that the newspaper serves their particular field too little or not well.
Many have expressed outrage that a critic has been able to crush or elevate works of art with his or her reviews.
Concert pianist Olli Mustonen was so aggrieved at a review by the celebrated - and famously curmudgeonly - music critic Seppo Heikinheimo (1938-1997) that he boycotted all appearances in Helsinki for several years in protest.
In the view of many representatives of the classical arts, in the current decade Helsingin Sanomat is guilty of pandering all too much to pop culture and of ignoring the higher arts.
In previous decades it was the popular culture fraternity who felt that Hesari gave them a raw deal.
It is still a popular jibe, more than 30 years on, to point out how in Helsingin Sanomat the demise of Elvis Presley was covered with a piece only one column wide.
NATO
The supporters and detractors of the alliance are no different from any of the other groups slagging off Helsingin Sanomat down the years.
First it was the pro-NATO camp who regarded the newspaper as over-cautious in this respect, and now the opponents of NATO membership claim the paper is frog-marching Finland into the organisation.
RELIGIOUS GROUPS
In the opinion of some believers, Helsingin Sanomat opposes the Christian faith, and anti-gay and fundamentalist groups have accused the paper of having homophile tendencies.
OPPONENTS OF IMMIGRATION
As far as some of the anonymous posters on the newspaper's discussion boards are concerned, Helsingin Sanomat is a hotbed of multiculturalism and flagrantly censors the truth about crimes committed by immigrants in Finland.
OTHER FINNISH MEDIA
In particular columnists, former HS reporters, and the journalists' professional periodical Journalisti have been active critics of Helsingin Sanomat over the years.
With the departure from newsstands of the independent conservative daily Uusi Suomi in 1991, the criticism rose in volume, not least because the newspaper became a more obvious single target.
Size has been a significant factor - it is quite reasonable to conclude that were Helsingin Sanomat's articles not read by a fifth of the population of Finland each day, had it not been the nation's largest daily since 1914 and a kind of national institution, then the paper would not have drawn quite so much fire from quite so many quarters.
But it's all good.
In the opinion of Helsingin Sanomat's present editor-in-chief Janne Virkkunen: "The positive thing is that the criticism we receive comes evenly and indiscriminately from all directions."
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.11.2009
On Monday of this week, Helsingin Sanomat marked up 120 years in existence, celebrating the event with a new look to the print-paper that is likely to infuriate as much as it draws compliments from readers.
There is nothing very new in this: the newspaper has been receiving brickbats from every conceivable direction ever since the liberal Päivälehti, Helsingin Sanomat's predecessor, first saw the light of day on November 16th, 1889.
The list of detractors is long and varied.
RUSSIA
Päivälehti, which existed until 1904, was regarded by Finland's Russian overlords of the time as a dangerous publication, since it promoted the strengthening of Finnish nationalism at a moment when Imperial Russia sought to put a leash on the Grand Duchy's autonomous status.
The Russian authorities suspended the publication of Päivälehti four times in its short life and eventually in 1904 the interruptions turned into a permanent stopping of the presses, shortly after the paper carried an editorial touching on the assassination of the Czar's Governor-General Nikolai Bobrikov.
Päivälehti's founder and editor-in-chief Eero Erkko had been sent into exile already in the previous year, being described as "one of the more significant fomenters of a clandestine insurgent movement and the spreader of underground literature".
Erkko spent time in the United States and Cuba, and returned in 1905, by which time Helsingin Sanomat (which first appeared under this name on July 7th 1904 - just four days after Päivälehti got the axe) was up and running. He took over as editor-in-chief shortly afterwards.
POLITICIANS
If Finland's Russian overlords in the years prior to Independence did not take kindly to Helsingin Sanomat or its earlier incarnation, Finnish politicians in the years after 1917 have been no more cordial towards the paper.
The left has branded the paper as excessively rightist and the right has accused it of having a left-wing bias - and every party has sought at one time or another to put together conspiracy theories about the newspaper's intentions.
In particular the influence of the principal owner Aatos Erkko (Eero's grandson and the newpaper's editor from 1961-1970) on individual articles sparked much speculation, and even today some still stubbornly see his hand in editorial policy.
Relations between the Erkko family and the liberal National Progressive Party became strained in the 1920s and 1930s, when the politicians believed the Helsingin Sanomat owners were concentrating too seriously on making money.
Within the parties of the right and in the rival newspaper Uusi Suomi (1919-1991), Helsingin Sanomat came in for a good deal of critical tut-tutting in the 1950s and 60s over the paper's liberal stance on advertising, which even brought - shock-horror - condom advertisements (!!) onto the pages of Hesari.
Those on the right felt the paper was too "commercial". At the same time, Helsingin Sanomat has also long been blasted as a craven mouthpiece of the Social Democrats.
At the end of the 1960s, the Finnish Left came up with the rhyming couplet "Springer-Erkko, porvarien verkko" (Springer-Erkko, the network of the bourgeoisie), a sideswipe in the direction of the large German publishing house founded in the late 1940s by Axel Springer.
In the 1970s, the main thrust of criticism of Helsingin Sanomat came from the far reaches of the left, including the orthodox pro-Soviet tendency "Taistoists" within the Finnish communist movement.
These days the paper - and particularly its weekly supplement Nyt - is a popular target of critics who claim either that it is "green leftist" or "green rightist", but in any case point out that the paper is steadfastly down on all things connected with the Centre Party.
Among Centre Party supporters, it is a well-known fact that "the southern media" enjoy nothing more than baiting the Centrists at every opportunity.
The accusations of smear campaigns against the Centre Party and its predecessor the Agrarian League have been one of the most popular means of smacking down Helsingin Sanomat practically throughout the paper's history.
Another specific source of regular irritation in their time were the political cartoons on the masthead page by the late Kari Suomalainen (1920-1999, active with the paper over four decades from the early 1950s).
This was so even though it was well known that politicians of all persuasions were extremely tickled to be included in Kari's drawings.
In the later years, at the turn of the 1980s and 90s, the cartoonist was accused of racism over his politically incorrect drawings of Somali asylum-seekers.
BUSINESS AND INTEREST GROUPS
Companies and banks have from time to time complained that their voice is not sufficiently well heard on the newspaper's pages.
Back in the early days, the commercial banks were unwilling to offer loans to the paper, and in so doing sought to stifle it or to turn it into the mouthpiece of Finnish business.
Throughout its history, Helsingin Sanomat has stressed how important financial independence is for journalism.
It is not only the business magnates who have been angry: the trade union movement has barked loudly that the newspaper does not understand strikes and is fawning towards the employer side in labour disputes.
At the same time, for many in the farming community, Hesari is just one more steaming dungheap produced by those unsavoury types down in Helsinki.
"THE QUALITY POLICE"
The newspaper has been blamed at different times for being both overly showy and having an excessive whiff of "officialdom" and civil-servant-mindedness about it.
One rival editor-in-chief earlier this decade attacked the paper for being "permanently worried about everything" and unnecessarily keen to listen to everyone's grievances equally.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the term "historical almanac" was a popular barb at a time when the newspaper was accused of trying to write about everything under the sun and had relatively little in the way of op-ed material in its pages, at least relative to the situation today.
Staffers at Helsingin Sanomat have often been described as "alienated from real life" behind the glass and steel walls of the editorial offices, spending their time criticising the world from their ivory tower.
Lately the tenor of the style police's favourite slogans has changed, and the newspaper is more often accused of having gone depressingly "down-market" and sunk into "entertainment". To some extent this may be a result of the introduction of an entertainment section (in addition to "Culture") in the online edition.
There is in any event much wagging of fingers on the discussion boards whenever Helsingin Sanomat dares to mention anything about reality-TV, for instance.
EU SCEPTICS AND BRUSSELS FANS
Before the referendum on EU membership in October 1994, the Helsingin Sanomat front page (traditionally given over to advertisements with the exception of Christmas Eve - and, incidentally, on the day after 9/11) carried an announcement signed by the Finnish Newspapers' Association, urging the Finns to say "Yes" to the European Union.
This got EU-sceptics fired up and brought criticism that the paper was using its clout to force the nation into bed with Brussels.
In 1991, however, the newspaper published an EU supplement (or more accurately an EEC/Common Market supplement) that was headlined "The Last Decision of Independent Finland", and this brought out the pro-Europe lobby to attack the paper as anti-European.
ARTISTS
Practically all artists, regardless of artform or genre, are of the opinion that the newspaper serves their particular field too little or not well.
Many have expressed outrage that a critic has been able to crush or elevate works of art with his or her reviews.
Concert pianist Olli Mustonen was so aggrieved at a review by the celebrated - and famously curmudgeonly - music critic Seppo Heikinheimo (1938-1997) that he boycotted all appearances in Helsinki for several years in protest.
In the view of many representatives of the classical arts, in the current decade Helsingin Sanomat is guilty of pandering all too much to pop culture and of ignoring the higher arts.
In previous decades it was the popular culture fraternity who felt that Hesari gave them a raw deal.
It is still a popular jibe, more than 30 years on, to point out how in Helsingin Sanomat the demise of Elvis Presley was covered with a piece only one column wide.
NATO
The supporters and detractors of the alliance are no different from any of the other groups slagging off Helsingin Sanomat down the years.
First it was the pro-NATO camp who regarded the newspaper as over-cautious in this respect, and now the opponents of NATO membership claim the paper is frog-marching Finland into the organisation.
RELIGIOUS GROUPS
In the opinion of some believers, Helsingin Sanomat opposes the Christian faith, and anti-gay and fundamentalist groups have accused the paper of having homophile tendencies.
OPPONENTS OF IMMIGRATION
As far as some of the anonymous posters on the newspaper's discussion boards are concerned, Helsingin Sanomat is a hotbed of multiculturalism and flagrantly censors the truth about crimes committed by immigrants in Finland.
OTHER FINNISH MEDIA
In particular columnists, former HS reporters, and the journalists' professional periodical Journalisti have been active critics of Helsingin Sanomat over the years.
With the departure from newsstands of the independent conservative daily Uusi Suomi in 1991, the criticism rose in volume, not least because the newspaper became a more obvious single target.
Size has been a significant factor - it is quite reasonable to conclude that were Helsingin Sanomat's articles not read by a fifth of the population of Finland each day, had it not been the nation's largest daily since 1914 and a kind of national institution, then the paper would not have drawn quite so much fire from quite so many quarters.
But it's all good.
In the opinion of Helsingin Sanomat's present editor-in-chief Janne Virkkunen: "The positive thing is that the criticism we receive comes evenly and indiscriminately from all directions."
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.11.2009
TEEMU LUUKKA AND ESA MÄKINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
teemu.luukka@hs.fi, esa.makinen@hs.fi