Description of SVT's governance

Establishment of public broadcasters by charters has its upsides and its downsides.

Upsides: it maintains the independence of the broadcaster.

Downsides: I have to read through Sweden's 1996 Television and Radio Law, the 2007 Licence Agreement, and the Supplement to the Licence Agreement, before finding that none of them contain anything on the governance of SVT.

Thankfully, this document contains information on SVT's governance, including: how the independent foundation members are appointed; how they further appoint the executive board members, and their tenure.

Journalists' partisan leanings in Sweden & SVT

I'm currently waiting on the data from Journalist '05, a regular (every five years) survey of Swedish journalists, which are as I write being turned into book form by Prof. Kent Asp and colleagues. In the meantime, here are some results from the 2000 survey:

	Public	Journalists	SVT Journalists
Left	15	31	33
Social Democrats	32	27	23
Centre	4	3	2
People's Party	5	14	17
Moderates	25	10	6
Greens	6	10	14
Christian Democrats	13	5	5

Journalists in general are more left-libertarian than the general population, being twice as likely to support the Left party, and almost twice as likely to support the Green party. Journalists with public broadcaster SVT are not markedly more left-wing than journalists in general: although they are more likely to support the Left, they are less likely to support the Social Democrats. In being three-times more likely to support the Folkpartei and more than twice as likely to support the Greens as the general population, they seem to favour the kind of well-meaning, intellectual borderline left positions taken on in the UK by the Liberal Democrats.

New Director-General for Sveriges Television

Eva Hamilton, SVT's Head of Fiction, was last Friday appointed Director General of the Swedish public broadcaster. With experience in SVT's News department, she comes to SVT after having worked for Aftonbladet ("independent social democrat") and Svenska Dagbladet ("independent, conservative") [Source for these judgements: BBC Media monitoring].