[Mika]

How many of you have heard that there have been wide protests in Spanish cities? According to my sources, a group called 15-M has organized a protest where official numbers state that about 50000 people have participated, but some comments say there have been a lot more. BBC report can be found from here. I saw a mention of this in a local news paper that this sort of thing is being planned, but there have been no comments about the actual protesting. Neither did I find any mention from the largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. Not much has been said about the protesting in Portugal or Greece. I do know about the talks of forming the government in Greece, but for me it looks Finnish media has already embraced the all too familiar path of finlandization, where all negative news towards the current policy makers are suppressed - and willingly by the reporters themselves.

My understanding at the moment is that the protest movement is radically downplayed here. This is nothing short of amazing to see with my own eyes, luckily we do have the internet now. The fact that the protests have now reached Frankfurt is also worth noting.

The question is, how long can they keep up the facade?

[Mika]

Insane. Even the Chinese media reports it with much better detail.

Apparently, we are now supposed to be in an imposed media blackout. This might have something to do with on-coming municipal elections, but nevertheless, doesn't bode well.

[The E]

The occupy movement isn't news anymore.

Which, in itself, isn't news.

(Oh, and this is being reported on spiegel.de, one of the biggest german news sites. So media blackout? Nope. Media disinterest? Probably.)

[Mika]

Ehh, I was talking about the Finnish media

Yes, German, British, Swedish and even Chinese media have it. We don't.

[Fury]

I don't see how discussing foreign media coverage in finnish papers or in other sources here helps anything. There should be better places to bring this up. Like say, finnish discussion forums like suomi24.fi or something.

[Unknown Target]

The "free press" has become radically less free in recent years. :\ It's like out of some bad sci-fi movie now.

But no, I haven't heard about it over here in the States.

[Mika]

I don't see how discussing foreign media coverage in finnish papers or in other sources here helps anything. There should be better places to bring this up. Like say, finnish discussion forums like suomi24.fi or something.

After having thought about it for a couple of days, I disagree. International forums are better places for this discussion. Causing a difference in Finland requires talking to people directly, forum discussions will not help much.

I'm calling the current behavior of the Finnish media as finlandization. It became apparent to me that they will never voice any concern while there was a chance to affect it, but start the mudslinging only after the organic matter has hit the fan and is obvious for everybody. More surprisingly, this thing has apparently been going on for at least 20 years, but has taken completely new magnitude during the last ten.

The reason why I place the discussion on international forums is simply that formerly we had a lot of people who were ashamed of the former self-censuring of the media regarding Soviet Union and Finnish government actions and wanted to get rid of it by joining the EU - which has turned out to be a grave mistake. It should be rather obvious that in this case media has failed rather specularly with regards to reporting of EU and does yet again the same parroting of the One Official Truth. In the process, the media has became again a laughing stock, and I indeed would like this to be known internationally.

Correcting mistakes starts from acknowledging them in the first place.