Episode 204 · 2023-07-27 · 18:58 · Original in Finnish
The Wiseguys Club and the media rage | Ivan Puopolo | Negotiator 204
Originally published as “Viisasteluklubi ja mediaraivo | Ivan Puopolo | Neuvottelija 204”
Ivan Puopolo joins Sami Miettinen in the middle of the press storm that followed the new right-wing government taking office. This is the Weekly Wiseguys club's own backstory: why the programme started, whether its format survives now that its guests sit in government, and what separates a video column from news journalism. The weightiest section asks whether a columnist may be criticised by name, and where the line runs between a private role and a professional one. Both participants are parties to the dispute they are describing.
Core theses
- A video column and a news report are different genres with different licences, and most of the dispute is about which one is being judged.
- The question of whether a columnist may be criticised by name is separable from whether a particular criticism was fair.
- A private role and a professional role can be distinguished in principle and rarely are in practice.
- Both participants are parties to the controversy, not observers of it.
Watch and listen
Key moments
- 00:00 — Ivan Puopolo, and the birth of the Weekly Wiseguys club
- 01:01 — A counterweight to the sanitised tone of traditional media
- 01:36 — Does the concept work under a right-wing government
- 02:53 — Finland has no real economic right
- 03:33 — Helsingin Sanomat's four-field model goes wrong
- 03:41 — The opposite of liberal is authoritarian, not conservative
- 05:02 — Subjective experience against objective reality
- 06:21 — Identity politics reduces the individual to their attributes
- 07:17 — A case of alleged targeting
- 07:54 — The media's fear of many voices
- 08:33 — A columnist's power against an MP's power
- 09:06 — Keeping the private role and the professional role apart
- 09:59 — The Nazi-background claim was brazen
- 10:57 — Attempts at cancellation and the employer's position
- 11:55 — Kevin Spacey, Johnny Depp and the cost of a media mill
- 12:55 — How the editor-in-chief should have acted
- 13:14 — The media sets itself up as mentor to MPs
- 14:36 — The video column as a genre, where exaggeration is allowed
- 15:30 — The journalists' guidelines, and the weight of Helsingin Sanomat
- 15:53 — Media literacy and old forum posts
- 16:28 — Context is remembered only when it suits
- 16:44 — Little House on the Prairie loses its award
- 17:30 — Blumenbach and racial classification
- 18:01 — Helsingin Sanomat's reluctant pieces about men
- 18:53 — Inner Circle: a surprise subject
Summary
Ivan Puopolo joins Sami Miettinen in the middle of the press storm that followed the new right-wing government taking office. This is the Weekly Wiseguys club’s own backstory: why the programme started, whether its format survives now that its guests sit in government, and what separates a video column from news journalism. The weightiest section asks whether a columnist may be criticised by name, and where the line runs between a private role and a professional one. Both participants are parties to the dispute they are describing.
The genre argument
Most of the dispute turns on which genre is being judged. A video column is allowed exaggeration in a way a news report is not, and the episode’s clearest contribution is insisting on that distinction before arguing about any particular case.
The question worth separating
Whether a columnist may be criticised by name is a different question from whether a given criticism was fair, and the two are constantly merged in the coverage. The episode separates them — while being, itself, one side of the argument.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Viisasteluklubi ja mediaraivo | Ivan Puopolo | Neuvottelija 204. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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People and topics
Guests: Ivan Puopolo
Topics: Free Speech & Society