YLE Under Attack: The DEI Leaks Crisis at Finland's Public Broadcaster | Sanna Ukkola, Ivan Puopolo

Summary

YLE’s CEO Merja Ylä-Anttila tried to reassure staff in an internal address by framing the broadcaster’s situation as an information attack and an information war. How did YLE (Finland’s public broadcaster) end up in this bind? Journalists Sanna Ukkola and Ivan Puopolo answer questions about a saga that started with revelations about diversity (DEI) training, escalated with the Lloyd Libison interview, and led to numerous leaks about YLE’s internal politics and internal guidelines. Why has the YLE Act failed so completely? Why are Sanna and Ivan’s fellow journalists staying silent?

Transcript

English transcript derived from validated English subtitles (WebVTT · SRT). Timestamps link to the original video.

00:00 But Merja is still in a position where she really should know what these ‘safer space’ guidelines actually are. She should know that these come from intersectional feminism. These are politically loaded guidelines. It’s just that the Yle Act is written so sloppily — frankly, it’s an unbelievably terrible law — that it allows for pretty much anything. I wonder why our colleagues aren’t saying anything. Alright, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. My guests today are Sanna Ukkola and Ivan Puopolo. Hey there. Hi, hi. Yle’s CEO Merja Ylä-Anttila used the words ‘information influencing’ and maybe even ‘information war’ in her internal pep talk. So Yle at least feels like it’s under threat, and we thought we’d talk about it. Couldn’t you say that, from Yle’s point of view, you’re actually the one who started this ‘information influencing,’ Sanna, with your Iltalehti exposé on inclusion and Yle’s questionable practices?

01:02 Well, actually it was Ilta-Sanomat that wrote about it roughly a week before me — that some Yle journalist had gotten a note saying he’d had too many straight men in his interviews. I’d also talked with my colleagues, former Yle people — since I was there myself for ten years, I know a lot of people. I’d heard similar things — like one colleague being told that every third interviewee should be a representative of some ethnic minority group. They hadn’t forced him into it, because he’d refused and cited journalistic reasons. But still I thought, what on earth is this — that you’d pick interviewees based on skin color, when interviewees should be chosen for journalistic reasons. And I asked if he had any document or something I could see, any data. And then I got to see this DEI training, which was actually pretty appalling, frankly.

02:05 Yle denied it, saying this isn’t mandatory and isn’t done. At the same time we have a parliamentary working group looking at Yle’s mission and especially its outrageous nearly 600-million-euro funding. Ivan Puopolo, on your weekly show we’ve talked many times, appalled at exactly these euros — isn’t it something, 1,500 journalists, 2,800 people, 600 million euros, of which 100 million goes to outsourced subcontracting and 500 million gets spent on their own stuff. Actually very little is known about it, and you too stuck your spoon in the soup by inviting Sanna and that Lloyd Libison, and you discussed whether it’s really true that Yle has mandatory or near-mandatory trainings — and this wasn’t just some random jump into the discussion for you either. Yeah, well, Lloyd Libison revealed all kinds of things there. Among other things, that some of them are mandatory — up until then that had been denied. It’s so murky, or the answers are so vague and murky, that it’s hard to figure out what was said and when.

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04:09 Now it’s come out that some of them are mandatory and some aren’t. And at first it was said that these DEI trainings don’t extend to journalistic content, until it came out that they do extend to journalistic content. After which it was said, so what if they do extend to journalistic content. Of course it matters — if I put it briefly, from a journalistic standpoint. When there are goals other than the audience’s truthful access to information, the audience develops a justified suspicion, as to whether they’re being honestly told everything that doesn’t lead toward that other goal of theirs, which in this case is this DEI [goal]. But let me quickly add something about the funding side — Yle has a really murky, roundabout system. So Yle is a limited company, even though it runs one hundred percent on public money, just like the police or the judiciary or whatever else. But because it’s a limited company, it’s bound by the Limited Liability Companies Act. And this Companies Act means Yle doesn’t have to disclose its budget and finances with the same level of detail that, say, the police have to.

05:19 And the result is, since they have this automatic cash flow of 600 million coming in, and they don’t really have to tell anyone exactly what the money’s spent on, it just gets sprayed around on whatever. like the chair of the governing council’s honeymoon — a 25th-anniversary honeymoon trip to Paris. Yeah, this definitely has traits of corruption and [unclear], so in a way, in my eyes, Yle’s pile of money is divided into journalistic operations, where those 1,500 Yle journalists have gone through this diversity DEI training, so they know how to write contextually good stories and pick interviewees with the right range of skin colors and genders. but besides that there’s also the media production side — like when drama or sports gets bought in, this extends there too, so in a way there are these drama guidelines being handed out — Ivan, you had an episode where there was this feminist dramaturge, so this runs through both the journalistic content — this diversity training works a bit differently there — and also into the other content, in a way,

06:22 isn’t that how it goes, and those are kind of two different baskets. Yeah, but the problem is exactly the same everywhere. In practice Yle has this social-policy goal, meaning improving the position of minorities in society. That can be a perfectly good goal, but it’s a political goal regardless. That kind of thing belongs to politicians. And now that it’s seeped into Yle’s operations — not just journalism but also these drama contents and everything else — the automatic consequence is that it makes us suspicious. For example, Yle recently published a story saying that acts of violence against minorities have increased significantly. That was a sentence stated in the lede. And at no point in the story did the journalist present any evidence to support that claim. I get that news articles don’t cite sources the same way a doctoral thesis does. We trust the journalist. But in this specific case, now that we know Yle has this DEI goal in the background, doubts arise — okay, are you being honest, where’s the evidence, was this cherry-picked on purpose from somewhere, could this even be outright lying — show us the evidence now. That’s the problem that follows from it.

07:37 Yeah, you’ve both been at Yle, but going back a while, Sanna — you had that Teräsammallahti Native American headdress thing — that’s kind of where it started, in a way, that if you joke about certain things with the wrong humor or tone, like Native American indigenous culture, it becomes a deadly serious matter. But has this always been the case at Yle — this certain kind of politicking, or diversity-goal thread running through things? That Native American headdress thing has nothing to do with this discussion, but no, it hadn’t. When I was at Yle, there weren’t goals of this kind. Back then the 50-50 thing came in — that half the people interviewed should be women. And I remember that me and one colleague were probably pretty loudly critical of it, saying this isn’t journalistic. I also don’t like — I never agreed to pick people based on gender either. But it got through anyway and now it’s there.

08:41 But for example in the series it’s similar — that women should make up a third of the interviewees. but apparently they’ve now backed off from that a bit, because the system hasn’t worked. People are interviewed for journalistic reasons, not because of identity politics. We’re not [defined by] our gender or skin color. People don’t represent some particular group — this is a horrifying idea to begin with, to group people this way. We are our thoughts and our skills and knowledge. Yeah, that’s how it is — you two are represented too, Ivan, this Italian-Finnish immigrant, exotic color, and Sanna of course is a woman, but over 268 episodes I don’t have anything like that in my lineup — I’m just racking up some inclusion points here, good, the universe is balanced now. I’ve never had anything like that. For example ten years ago, when I hosted Pressiklubi and invited people on — and there are a lot of political journalists there — they were very male-dominated.

09:46 Because back then about 10 percent of political journalists were women, but now probably around 50 percent of political journalists are already women. Tomorrow I have three women and one man on my panel. Same last week, same the week before that. So these days I’m starting to have more women, but it comes organically — it doesn’t come through any gender quotas or reward systems, it comes along as society changes, and the panels change with it. But Yle’s explanations are completely contradictory the whole time — they clearly know these kinds of goals are non-journalistic, and that’s why they initially tried to deny it, saying we don’t have goals like this in our journalism. Jokinen: ‘We think about everything except diversity.’ And then when it did come out, they said, well, so what. And now they say this is a legal obligation. The law requires it. Okay, has the law changed? Because before 2018 these didn’t really exist. The law hasn’t changed one bit, so where did this obligation suddenly come from?

10:47 Of course it doesn’t require it. It’s just that the Yle Act is written so sloppily — frankly it’s an unbelievably terrible law — that it allows for pretty much anything. You can always say, okay, this is our public-service obligation. We’ve put it this way — when A-studio is the flagship and the best example of societal discussion there, then the question arises, okay, this really is public service, But why do you have all these shows like Au Pairs, Tits Out on the Beach, and Pussy Diaries and whatnot? Well, the logic is that in order for people to watch A-studio, you need these other things too. So that counts as public service too. So basically anything at all is public service. That’s how it is, and it’s like this — when money just keeps coming in, tens of millions a year, it gets stuffed somewhere, and at some point it starts going toward corporate-level fluff, like diversity trainings or the CEO’s strategies, where a political direction is actually being sought for Yle’s output. Maybe related to that, Lloyd Libison — he was also working at Yle,

11:51 but as a subcontractor, and it’s interesting that this Yle Oy ordered services from a small-scale subcontractor, but then when he essentially blew the whistle, in my opinion, and said this leadership has been lying, that yes, there have been near-mandatory trainings here, and a few other points — immediately he was suspended from his own show, then his immediate supervisor publicly criticized him, and now other media outlets have also been writing pretty condemning pieces, including about his book. Isn’t there a bit of a pattern here — at least he’s this small whistleblower, which is corny, by the way, since he’s a Black man — there’s a bit of a pile-on happening because you published this. The aggression directed at Lloyd Lipison has gotten downright ridiculous, not just on social media but also from journalists and columnists. For example Jyrki Lehtola wrote a completely tasteless column about Lipiso, and Helsingin Sanomat wrote a review of his book,

12:53 which wasn’t really a review of his book but a review of him, and it was absolutely crushing. And factual errors too. There were factual errors, and it was really outrageous. [unclear] this whole hype. It’s purely connected to that. Lloyd Lipiso really has nothing to do with this whole discussion. It’s just become personalized around him now. The same things he said in that interview with Ivan have come from everywhere else too, from all directions. Mainly what he said was that these trainings are mandatory. It’s right there in Yle’s annual report. It’s documented that some of these trainings are mandatory. People are required to attend them. And then he talked about these ‘safer space’ guidelines, that Yle has these safer-space guidelines. Well, we already knew this from elsewhere — we have these guidelines in hand. He didn’t really bring any new information, but he just said it with his own face on it, which is why it got pinned on him personally. But I have dozens of sources from inside Yle, and people who’ve worked at Yle, telling and leaking me these things — Libiso isn’t the only one.

14:02 And good that you’re leaking this, but they still don’t dare to do it under their own name. But could you say that not all of Yle’s 2,800 employees share the line of Yle’s management and editorial leadership, and are rebelling at least in this way, by telling you things from inside the company? Yeah, and right now I’m actually hearing from several sources that they’re afraid of getting caught, because they see what’s happening to Libiso. Then there are starting to be manager-level people on the intranet saying that whoever’s leaking these things should be fired. And, like, that kind of surveillance — a Stasi vibe. The information war’s first wave of mobilization. So, they’re scared right now. And when you listened to the briefing Merja Ylä-Anttila gave to her own staff, she not only brought up this term ‘information war,’ she also clearly didn’t just hint at it, but said outright, that the video clips originally leaked from Yle that Sanna published would be illegal.

15:03 that you had done something illegal in publishing those videos. I’ve been a journalist for probably over a decade now, and I really do know this law. There’s nothing illegal about it. It falls within the right of quotation. It’s complete nonsense. But the fact that she’s saying — implying — that I acted illegally, hinting at it, without using my name, in front of her three thousand subordinates. That I’d done something illegal. I’d like to ask Merja Ylä-Anttila, could you specify exactly what I’ve done. Plus, there’s also the— In my opinion, outright false information is being spread to staff — that publishing videos which actually fall under the right of quotation would be illegal. That means some journalist listening in there might think, ah, so you’re not allowed to do that. So it leads to his case — he ends up withholding information from the public, for example, because he thinks it would be illegal to publish. Yeah, I can well imagine that in Merja Ylä-Anttila’s head she’s building this rallying-cry feeling — us against them, we’ll win this fight — but that requires everyone to be loyal to her, nothing gets leaked here, or you’ll end up like Lloyd Lipiso — things go really badly, look right there.

16:14 She said flat out, don’t give these stories to Iltalehti, don’t leak to Iltalehti. She even used the word Iltalehti — talk to her instead. And my sources asked, how are you even supposed to speak up inside there when that’s the atmosphere. Right, there’s a funny thing connected to this — Yle’s protective mechanism, how it works. This might be a bit technical, but a limited company can have three kinds of management elements, so to speak. The CEO, the board, and the governing council. And Yle has all three in use. Most limited companies probably don’t have a governing council, because it’s this kind of social club that doesn’t actually do anything. It’s full of politicians who don’t understand a thing about journalism, except Susanne Päivärintä does understand. But the politicians there don’t get it. Right, but the key thing here is that this governance thing is basically playacting. The whole time it’s pretend that this governing council is the body overseeing Yle. So when unpleasant news about Yle comes out and people want to find out whether everything’s actually in order,

17:15 they say, alright, CEO, go report to the governing council on how things are going. And since the governing council is itself part of the leadership, it’s actually a beneficiary of Yle. The governing council members get something like 12 grand a year as compensation for being on the council, plus of course every now and then a honeymoon trip to Paris, and so on. Now this body supposedly oversees Yle. It’s exactly like saying to Merja Ylä-Anttila, hey, we heard there are problems in your company. Go find out if that’s true and then give us a report on whether it holds up. That’s exactly what the governing council is. Nobody’s really overseeing Yle at all. Except the media, which also doesn’t oversee it. No, I don’t dare write about it. People just yell at me and Ivan about this. I wouldn’t want to talk about this. This is really awkward and extremely unpleasant. Especially since I’ve been at Yle myself, and Ivan’s been there too, and all of us have connections there. We don’t want to be doing this. But everyone’s staying quiet, probably because they want to secure their own job there in the future.

18:19 It’s such an enormous, massive employer. Same with politicians. Politicians, with a few exceptions, don’t really criticize Yle much, because they want to stay on good terms with Yle — because they want airtime there. They’ve all got a honeymoon trip coming up. Right, and politically it’s also tricky, because ownership responsibility doesn’t really materialize either — the government has no direct control over Yle. It’s somehow been outsourced to a parliamentary working group, where the opposition has the same weight as the government side. meaning all the parties have to agree on Yle’s funding, which makes it harder than amending the constitution. So even amending the constitution is easier than changing Yle. So it’s just this massive, 600-million-euro pile of ownerless money, that nobody oversees. Just incomprehensible. And then we get criticized for talking about the journalistic side of it. I, for example, haven’t weighed in on the funding debate at any point, because to me that’s a completely separate discussion.

19:21 I don’t want to take a stance on that. I talk about journalism, I talk about media. Yeah, that’s right. But on top of Yle having this kind of automatic funding with no oversight at all — that’s actually illegal. The whole setup is illegal. From a competition-law standpoint — EU competition law, that is. EU competition law states very clearly that the state can’t produce anything involving economic activity — commercial economic activity. Except with a special exemption, but still. And Yle breaks all sorts of EU competition rules. It’s blindingly obvious that it violates these laws. But there’s nothing — well, there’s the EU Commission, where you can file a complaint. And Sanoma has actually done that, and there are other complaints currently pending there too. When they eventually come through, there’ll definitely be a ruling. Well, it’s not a court, but a formal directive will come out of it. So in every way, the whole Yle setup is just an incomprehensible amateur outfit. Exactly for these reasons. And going back to this parliamentary working group — right now the situation is that a majority of citizens think Yle’s funding should be cut, that their tax money is just being squandered on whatever there.

20:28 That’s partly probably tied to Yle’s politicization too — citizens are fed up, they don’t want to watch this politicized use of tax money — but they can’t cut it, they can’t pull it off, because it requires unanimous agreement among all the parties. Yeah, I’ll sign onto that — well, it kind of loops back around, let’s say 550 million worth of content that gets handed out to the market for free, most of which — of that 550 million — would probably happen commercially anyway. Of course the journalistic activity and the Finland-related cultural output probably wouldn’t be commercial, but there are things like the hundred-million-euro purchases from film production companies, for instance, and that’s, in my opinion, a pretty corruption-prone playing field — where, like we saw in this Lloyd Libison case too, if you break some rule, it’s goodbye to your production relationship. so there are probably some pretty unhealthy directives coming from Yle, like ‘make this kind of content and that kind.’ And if on top of that you have these diversity goals, which turn into a political goal,

21:31 those turn into content goals for the subcontractors too. In my opinion Yle is corrupted all the way down through that subcontracting chain too. Right, but I’d correct one thing there — journalistic content does get produced commercially too. So if we play out a scenario where Yle disappeared from the market entirely, then commercial companies would meet the journalistic demand that the audience wants. And sure, some small stuff would be left out, but the problem that would arise from not having Yle at all, is that in commercial companies there’s always the risk of commercial interests bleeding into journalistic content. There are firewalls for exactly that reason — the editor-in-chief makes sure that sales and marketing never march into the newsroom, so to speak, and say, ‘go make this and that.’ But we have no guarantee that these firewalls always hold. They can perfectly well leak too. And that’s why you need a genuinely non-commercial company, one that never has any commercial interests at all. And that’s Yle.

22:32 But Yle doesn’t need 600 million to carry out this mission — maybe 100 million or 150 would be enough. The budget for news and current affairs programming is actually 150 million. and then on top of that there’s creative content, since journalistic content gets made there too, so let’s say another twenty or thirty million on top — meaning Yle’s journalistic content production budget is a bit under 200 million. By the way, I’ll add this — this leads the so-called scoop statistics, meaning when you count which outlet produces the most scoops, it’s usually Yle or Helsingin Sanomat, they alternate at the top. And how many scoops come in a year? A scoop means STT has cited that particular news story. Oh, is that what it actually means? That’s the definition of a scoop. They produce around 130-140 scoops a year. And since the price tag of that production machinery is a bit under 200 million, that works out to about 1.2-1.3 million per scoop that we pay for Yle’s scoops.

23:32 For Hesari it’s a completely different scale. We’re talking about tens of times less money per scoop. So Yle’s completely inefficient. Maybe Sanna, you could go back to this inclusion guideline thing — one of the leaks was specifically that these diversity spreadsheets have been kept. What kind of things were actually being logged there? This was from 2020, I think, four years ago — this spreadsheet, as I understand it, which I also had a copy of. It had ethnic background — whether they’re Finnish, age, woman, man. I also have in my possession internal newsroom memos from various groups, in which they say they’ve kept spreadsheets on, among other things, people’s bodies, what kind of body someone has. They’ve also been given training on what kind of body is allowed to appear in the media. opinions, ways of thinking, family relationships, absolutely everything.

24:35 And the goal is probably to get that diversity, to sort of go beyond the population’s normal range, so minorities get representation, even at the cost of journalistic choices and casting decisions. Right, and when I’ve listened to these DEI trainers’ material, what’s been published in Ilta-Sanomat for example, they’re actually acting against journalistic principles. So for instance, take a training related to disability — there the trainer, and this is specifically the training session Libison talked about, there the trainer told the trainees, meaning the journalists, to think about how normally — that stories about disabled people tend to be told as sort of hero stories, when they carry out ordinary everyday tasks, like it’s somehow amazing that they can do the same things able-bodied people can, so this trainer told the journalists to refrain from telling these hero stories, because not all disabled people necessarily like them.

25:39 And this is completely wrong journalistically. You should never think about how the audience will react. That shouldn’t factor into the judgment at all — instead you consider whether there’s news value here, whether it’s interesting, whether it’s socially significant, and so on. And then if you conclude that yes, it is, you publish it regardless of how the audience reacts, whether someone likes it or not. And I’ll just say this — in a situation like that, if there’s a phenomenon where some disabled people don’t like the hero stories being told about them, then the right approach isn’t to stop telling hero stories, it’s to do a story about that phenomenon — that some people don’t like these stories. So in effect they were being told to suppress information, which is just plain wrong. And they’ve also gone — in that DEI training I saw, there was this Newslab thing — what is Newslab exactly? It’s a kind of news development unit. So they’d gone to some immigrant neighborhoods to ask immigrants how stories about them should be made.

26:45 So they asked the subjects themselves how they should be portrayed. And it was the same with gender minorities. They’ve also asked what gender minorities expect from Yle and how stories about them should be made. Which is, sure, a nice idea journalistically, but this really isn’t social policy — this is supposed to be journalism. And it’s not even a nice idea. When do they go? In general, sure, of course we want to treat gender minorities well, but we’re talking about journalism here. And then there’s also the thing that if you look at these young journalists, about 40 percent of journalists who’ve been in the field less than 10 years think, that the purpose of journalism is to change the world and make it better. And that, in a way, they’re already operating agenda-first. And Matti Apunen, chairman of Yle’s board, has commented on this himself and knows this statistic. And he talked about it and said this isn’t okay, that this is mission-driven journalism.

27:45 that this has nothing to do with journalism. If Matti Apunen knows this, and that journalists in general aren’t particularly prejudiced toward minorities, but rather very sensitive — probably the most sensitive group of people you can find in Finland — do they really need, on that scale, that kind of training? That reminds me — again, not directly related — but Matti Apunen, Jouko Jokinen — there was that Matti Kuusela fabrication incident. We actually had a discussion about it with Ivan and Matti Virtanen, where both of them sort of defended the fabrication, in a way. I think this is kind of the same thing — that it’s become acceptable to create a fantasy world, one that isn’t the same as the real world, as long as it advances your wishful idealism about the world. It’s a bit the same in this HSL fare-dodging thing. First they put it out a bit — former officials went to the media saying it’s not good to ride without paying.

28:46 Then someone gets offended on their behalf, hinting that it’s not right toward the minority, that they specifically ride without paying. Then it gets pulled, and then it gets reinstated. This is just totally vapid and childish minority-protection stuff that really doesn’t serve those minorities at all. Right, and honestly the journalistic rule there is really simple — minorities and majorities are people. You treat them as people, and nothing else. And here — I know it can be hard for people to understand — why you couldn’t just go and ask sexual minorities, say. But maybe the understanding opens up like this. You also don’t go ask the National Coalition Party how a story about them should be made. Or ask Aito avioliitto how they’d want us to report on their push for marriage to remain only between a man and a woman, or ask anti-abortion groups, or the Finnish Sisu group, or so on. I’ll give you — I’ll put it in Ricky Gervais’s words, representing an extremely exclusive one-percent minority, or a middle-aged investment banker — I’d give you guidance to handle this with the utmost respect, and let me just mansplain everything, nice and obediently, that way.

29:53 That’s a journalistic guideline for you, on how I should be handled. Exactly. Yeah, but something like that — of course you can calibrate the interview situation, that’s probably fine, if the journalist genuinely doesn’t know how, say, trans people live, it can be good background knowledge for them — but it can’t be that the journalistic angle of the interview is the interviewee’s wishes. Right, and besides, I’m pretty sure those wishes are things like — don’t offend them, don’t portray them in a bad light, don’t show stereotypes, can’t do this, can’t do that, have to use these and those terms, and so on. That’s the wrong way of thinking. Instead you should think about what the audience needs, not what the interviewee needs — and then you’re serving the audience, not the interviewee. Yeah, journalists call me quite a lot actually, but it’s really tiresome. Even yesterday one called. They always want background, and then I give them a half-minute — not half-hour — mansplaining session on how this works. They never actually end up using the quote from me, which I find really annoying, but isn’t this backgrounding thing still perfectly acceptable in a way — that background discussion?

30:59 Of course. It’s not about anything other than sticking to conveying truthful, balanced information to the audience. That’s your only goal. Not whether someone out there gets offended, or whether the world becomes better or worse because of it. That doesn’t matter at all. If the information is true and it’s significant, then that’s that — you publish it for the audience, period. Yeah, generally this leadership tier seems to keep fumbling and there’s no consequence, but hasn’t at least the editor-in-chief been a kind of transitional solution here, with a replacement coming fairly soon? But is Ylä-Anttila also getting close to retirement age here — is this actually a situation where the leadership’s position is shaking? Right, well Jouko Jokinen is about to retire soon, and Panu Pokkinen is coming in — who’s, in my opinion, considerably sharper than Jouko, to put it bluntly.

32:06 And Ylä-Anttila is of course already at the age where people in the industry are wondering at what point she’ll retire. I don’t believe for a second that this is some project of Ylä-Anttila’s, but I think she’s a bit uninformed. I read on Merja’s Facebook wall when she was explaining the safer-space guidelines. and she kind of wrote that, well, she doesn’t really know what these safer-space guidelines are, but since young people have such a hard time, she let the young people put together guidelines like this themselves. But Merja is still in a position where she really should know what these safer-space guidelines actually are. She should know that these come from intersectional feminism. These are politically loaded guidelines. These aren’t okay. If she doesn’t know, she should find out. Right, but back to the point that there are no consequences for leadership — it’s worth remembering that Yle’s oversight body is the governing council,

33:08 which is supposed to hand out those consequences — but lo and behold, the governing council’s beneficiary and chairman after taking a 25th-anniversary honeymoon trip to Paris on taxpayers’ money, upon returning gave a statement to the media about this DEI [matter], which was, practically speaking, word for word Word for word. the same as the one Yle’s management had given about a month and a half earlier. ‘Porridges and gruels [mixed up]’ was in the headline of Yle’s four editors-in-chief’s rebuttal to my piece, saying that things have now gotten all mixed up. And then he, Valle Heimo, used the exact same phrase, even — that porridges and gruels have gotten mixed up. And then, allegedly, that in this discussion diversity and multivocality had somehow gotten mixed up. It hasn’t. And this is exactly the same as what these editors-in-chief [said]. So he’s repeating word for word what Yle’s management said. Yeah, thinking about this governance structure — my very first conversation with Ivan, by the way, was about the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, it’s a classic, we’ll put the link here — and we debated it, and generally a normal person thought equality of opportunity is a healthy starting point, whereas equality of outcome is, in a way, forced.

34:27 What do you mean, normal person? That’s actually already a left-wing thing, come on. But Yle enforces this equality of outcome through the fact that this inclusion also applies to their employees, meaning if there are potentially two equally qualified people and one of them is just more ‘suitable,’ then that one gets chosen according to Yle’s code. At the very least there’s a strong suspicion that this could happen. Right, and it’s not just Yle — a recommendation like this exists at, say, the City of Helsinki too, it’s right there in Finnish law. So, an instruction to discriminate. Positive discrimination is always a form of discrimination. Yes, yes. At the City of Helsinki this has been in use since, I believe, around 2012. By the way, I’ll say this — if there’s a situation where you have two equally strong candidates, whatever the wording of the law is there, you’re supposed to give preference to this, meaning giving priority to the person belonging to the underrepresented group. This is of course discrimination, but the right approach in a situation like that would be to let a draw decide. If there really are two equally-valued people, then you draw lots — flip a coin. That doesn’t discriminate.

35:29 But let me come back for a second to, say, some genuinely fair criticism — Lloyd Libison probably isn’t the main character of this story, but he is a Black man and, by all these inclusion criteria, basically a poster child — and yet he’s the one who gets kicked into the spotlight and put through the wringer. It really is strange — this internal irony just kind of explodes the whole horizon, in my opinion. Right, and I found it funny — Lehtola for instance, he’s a fun guy and I consider it a great honor to make it into his columns or satirical pieces — but he hinted in there that Lloyd Libiso had somehow used us, or mainly me, on that podcast to sell his own book down the line. That topic caused this whole uproar. And then Lehtola said there that a more skeptical journalist would have, in a way, left something like that undone. That was his logic there. But by that logic, then, all of Helsingin Sanomat, MTV, Iltalehti, Iltasanomat, and Uusi Suomi — at least these come to mind —

36:31 were non-skeptical, because they published the story, did follow-up pieces, and kept the uproar going. So is our media really this bad, that they all fell for this Lloyd Libison ‘scam’ the whole time? And that argument in general — I’ve written one book myself, and I know how much money you make from books in this country: basically nothing. It’s basically zero. And on top of that, he lost his job at Yle too. Was it a profitable deal? It’s extremely disadvantageous for him financially. That’s true, but that also ties into this whole field a bit — the monthly salary Yle pays those fifteen hundred journalists, some of whom are probably subcontractors, those are probably the best jobs in the journalism field in Finland, so of course nobody wants to fall out of that. And then, possibly, if you’re out there on the tough commercial side — like I have to run ads in between, which Yle doesn’t have to do, and Sanoma and the others do too — then I kind of think they still hold onto this little dream: what if I got to go make this kind of content over there without any commercial constraints on it.

37:37 where all the costs are covered and you don’t have to sell it forward for a single euro. That’s Yle’s own kind of corrupted allure, in a way. You could think that journalists censor themselves, because they want to stay on good terms with people at Yle, but maybe they’d also like to become a Yle journalist themselves. Of course, that’s pretty obvious. Plus there’s just this purely human, psychological trait involved, where you’re nice to your colleagues. I at least want to make this clear — I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it now as plainly as possible — I know plenty of journalists at Yle. And they’re damn good at what they do. This isn’t in any way about criticizing Yle’s journalists. It’s more about management trying to steer those journalists toward non-journalistic choices. And they end up having to fight between those two — their own journalistic integrity and the pressure coming from management. I find it a bit funny, honestly, that there’s someone like Ruben Stiller, who was on the Viiden jälkeen show and said — actually I called Ruben yesterday and talked with him about this.

38:43 He said he hasn’t experienced anything like this. Ruben is one of Yle’s most well-known journalists, a long-time flagship-name journalist, one of Finland’s most recognizable journalist brands. If he hasn’t experienced a producer telling him he’s got too many straight men, that doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t. And the fact that Ruben goes and — since I hadn’t talked to him before, I told him now that I have quite a few of his colleagues telling me about this, who are afraid of getting caught. So to me it’s kind of a strange move from Ruben, to go and declare that nothing like this exists at Yle, if he hasn’t seen it himself. It’s like me saying polar bears don’t exist because I’ve never seen one. Right, and then I remember Heikki Pursiainen has also criticized both of us. He was at Yle. [unclear] And this guy from Libera has gone completely off on his own lately. It’s gone totally overboard. But he had a radio program at Yle about us, not really about the actual issue itself.

39:43 Heikki Pursiainen is, I believe, a regular guest on several Yle programs, because his views are in tune with Yle’s. But Pursiainen said he doesn’t like this yapping, this attempt to show that Yle has a red-green agenda. I’m not trying to show that Yle has a red-green agenda — I’m saying there’s crap mixed into Yle’s journalistic principles that shouldn’t be there. It doesn’t matter whether it’s red-green or blue-black or whatever color it is. That’s not what matters — what matters is that those principles are being steered by something other than what they should be. And that’s true, no matter what Pursiainen thinks about it. This is completely self-evident journalistically. Heikki Pursiainen isn’t even a journalist. Yeah, I think so. That’s what I wonder about — why our colleagues don’t say anything. Why are they quiet? They come and tell me. They tell me privately. But why don’t they say it publicly? Well, that’s cancel culture. I’ve asked a couple of colleagues, actually more than a couple, why they’re staying quiet. And even people who, say, write some kind of media column.

40:46 one of them answers that because the Finns Party and the funding debate are in the air right now, they don’t want to get branded as part of that Finns-Party corner. I really want to keep this discussion separate from the funding debate. Unfortunately these are happening at the same time, which is uncomfortable, but they’re two different discussions. Another one says their health can’t handle it. And, well, different reasons — they have friends at Yle and whatever, but there they are. Right, and then there’s also that group of journalists who don’t see any problem in it. Well, most of the people I’ve actually talked to — quite a few of them — they all do see it. They see the problem, okay. But I’ll say one more thing about Pursiainen — he specifically wants to steer the discussion toward funding. And on that he has really good ideas. I really do agree with him on practically all of that. He just doesn’t want to talk about the journalistic side of things, or he basically says that this supposed phenomenon doesn’t even exist — that something has leaked into journalism.

41:47 Or he says we’re dealing with trivial nitpicking — like, if somewhere at Yle Kioski at some point there was some DEI guideline, so what? And this too, by the way — since Libison has been talked about, and then there was Jesse Sarkkinen in your interview, and both of them were from the Yle Kioski and Yle X side, the youth side — a lot of people now have this misconception that this is somehow purely a youth-programming issue, which it isn’t. My sources, for example, are from all over the place — I don’t have any youth-side sources at all. So it probably stands out more on the youth side, but it’s just as much there on the news side. I have several sources on the news and current affairs side. Plus we’ve got that video clip where it’s said out loud, straight from Yle itself. But this omertà, this code of silence here, where nobody comes forward with their own face but tells you things under source protection — I think that gets exaggerated, because two-way social media is basically dead now. so on X you can hardly get pile-on-harassed anymore, and if someone rattles off columns about you, so what. There’s not much to be afraid of there.

42:50 In my opinion people could grow a pair, if they’ve kind of maybe that’s a poor choice of words, but get a bit braver and also, under their own name, offer some criticism. Actually I’ve done a lot of media criticism, because I too have hosted Pressiklubi and I speak with the deep chest-voice of experience. There isn’t much of it — our media is really bad at criticizing itself and talking about itself in general. That kind of two-way discussion — even when you do see those conversations, what’s actually being said there is somehow just kind of foolish. And taunting from anonymous accounts, and you probably get DMs or anonymous messages, but I honestly don’t get anything negative. And it’s always easy to respond two-way, even to trolls. Somehow there’s this fear of public shaming, in a way, of cancellation and two-way communication — way too much. That’s mostly gone now, honestly. So a few years ago there was real cancellation, where you’d lose your job instantly over some offhand remark or a radical opinion that went against the consensus. I don’t think that exists anymore.

43:50 Right. Yeah, but let’s hope Yle recovers from this, learns its lesson and opens up, and then gives up some of its power and a sensible portion of its budget, and journalism gets its honor back, but Yle is now a limited company, and in my opinion it receives the biggest corporate subsidy in Finland. You could think of it as a subsidy in a different sense, because while it does provide public service itself, it also takes up a huge amount of room in the commercial market. There was that Stora Enso freshwater pearl mussel scandal — and there too, when there was a subcontractor involved, it was immediately Stora Enso’s fault for all these subcontractors’ actions. Yle is definitely trying to control that entire subcontractor chain with a really iron fist. Everyone making content for them is under pretty tight direction. Right, and maybe there’s also that side — how much, in that hundred-million-euro purchase of production in Finland, there’s a kind of bowing and scraping to Yle’s wishes, making content specifically tailored to what Yle wants, because that’s huge money on the commercial side.

44:58 So people who don’t actually work at Yle, but who get that hundred million worth of commissioned work. Right, you mean these subcontractors, like production companies. Right, say it’s Yellow Films or whoever else that does productions — is there always this fear in the back of their mind that if they don’t properly please Yle’s line, next year those five-million-euro commissions are gone? But they have these feminist pocket dramaturges and whatnot that they then have to fill quotas for. And it’s not even just that — at Yle, if you go pitch Yle a TV program, there’s this DOCS form you have to fill out, and it asks in detail about everything, like how many, how you’ve ensured the position of minorities in the production team, and there’s all sorts of these background questionnaires. And I know these small production companies are, in a way, in trouble — like, where are they supposed to find a Black gay editor to edit this material? So the requirements themselves are absolutely absurd, they’re contradictory — first you’re not allowed to assume gender, but then you still have to count how many women and men there are,

46:01 It’s really just an utterly nonsensical religion, which has now been extended so far that everyone has to bow down to it, even though there’s no sense in it at all. Yeah. Well, free speech is being threatened by Finland’s biggest media player, Yle — I wouldn’t have believed we’d see this day, but hopefully this scrutiny now — truth is the best disinfectant, as people say — brings some order to this Yle house. Even though they themselves don’t want to open up, it’s probably good that you and other outlets are pulling back a bit of that veil of mystery there. Thank you both — my guests today have been Ivan Puopolo and Sanna Ukkola. I’d suggest we head over to the Inner Circle side and talk more about some media topic. I could imagine maybe cancel culture and ‘woke’ as a topic could be one theme we could discuss with you, briefly, just for subscribers. Would that work?

47:03 Yeah.