Trial by a lying media

Sweden's own Josef Fritzl story was hardcore fake news. I know it was fake because Tove and I spent a whole year proving it was.

Photos like these came to illustrate the Ystad Family case in Swedish media, different variants of the closed gates to the family property. This particular photo is an unauthorized theft from Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet.

A couple of months ago Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten wrote several articles about why mass media very rarely lies. His thesis is that in our age of information abundance it is never necessary to lie. It is more than enough to just pick the information that conforms with the argument you are trying to make. 

He might be right in general, the media probably do not lie most of the time. But sometimes the urge to lie is simply irresistible. Some stories demand a certain flexibility with the truth. There is one case where the Swedish mass media most definitely lied. Not only did the mass media lie. The public gratefully lapped up their lies. I know this is the case, because I have the whole story, both the true and the untrue versions. 

Ystad in the headlines

Ystad is a middling town in the very south of Sweden. To a Danish audience it is best known as the gateway to Bornholm, a Danish island that happens to lie on the wrong side of Sweden. To the rest of the international community Ystad might be known as the home of Kurt Wallander, the fictional protagonist in a number of Scandi noir novels by Henning Mankell. But probably it is not known at all.

In Sweden, Ystad is known for all of the above (except maybe Bornholm, which many Swedes would have difficulty placing on a map). Including being not known at all. It is the 63rd largest town in Sweden and consequently garners about the 63rd most interest. Which is not much interest at all. 

This all changed for a couple of weeks in June 2019 when Ystad suddenly found itself in the center of media attention. The reason was an egregious case of child maltreatment.

Instead of trying to summarize the media frenzy around this story myself I will do something even better: I will let the Swedish media do it for me. I have translated the following article from Swedish tabloid Expressen. It is a summary of the Ystad Family story published on 4 June 2019, two days after the story hit the headlines.

The Ystad couple isolated their children - This has happened

In the middle of the idyll of Österlen five siblings have been isolated and withheld from society, something that Sydsvenskan has exposed in several articles.

This is the story in brief.

The children in Ystad were removed from their parents in August 2018

In August 2018 four siblings were removed from their parents by the child protection services in Ystad. The fifth sibling is over 18 and opted to stay with his parents.

When the social services arrived at the family's house they were met by dilapidated buildings and neglected children. One of the children is described as "filthy and skinny" by a social worker. After they were placed in care, investigations have shown that the children lack fundamental skills and education. They lack perception of time, are physically weak and have serious deficiencies in language.

The family in Ystad has lived isolated - distanced from relatives

According to several neighbors the family of five has lived in the house for approximately 15 years. But they have lived isolated and none of the neighbors have had any meaningful contact with them.

Even relatives have been kept at bay by the family. One relative tells Expressen that the parents have "shut him out" for 13 years now.

- All these years I have been thinking that maybe it will get better. I have tried to keep in contact but you cannot force something like that. It has been hard but if what the media says is true then the children have had it much worse than me.

The children in Ystad never attended school

The children have never attended Swedish school. The parents have explained that they traveled a lot in their jobs and the children attended an exclusive American internet based school. It has been proven that the children did not attend this school. According to the headmaster in the US the parents have only bought some education material from the school several years ago.

The school board in Ystad waited nine years before checking if the children attended the American school. Today the school board is critical of its own acting.

- We have only ourselves to blame. We have done wrong and the best we can hope for is to not do it again, says Christer Olofsson, head of the school board in Ystad.

The parents in Ystad were reported to the police and acquitted

The parents have been accused of criminal negligence and their case handed over to the police. On 31 August - three days after the children were placed into care - the social services accused the parents of four different crimes. The preliminary investigation was started in September but eight days later, on 27 September, the case was closed. Social services in Ystad tried to appeal but the decision stood.

A very Swedish wickedness

Other articles provided more juicy details about the children, like this one from the 2 June 2019 in tabloid Kvällsposten:

"The investigation shows that the children lack fundamental skills for functioning in Swedish society. Several of the children do not know how to tie their shoes, they do not know how to take a shower or how to use the toilet, according to HD-Sydsvenskan. One child was unable to peel a banana he got, according to a verdict in the administrative court that Kvällsposten has also read."

Especially that banana accusation became a sort of symbol for the whole case. One tiny detail that showcased the wickedness of the parents. Just imagine a child so isolated that he has never seen a banana! 

In the summer of 2019, this story was the biggest thing that happened in Swedish media. Article after article was produced. And people clicked and clicked. Clearly the case intrigued people. And enraged them. Something like this had never been published by Swedish media before and people were soon up in arms. 

In the upper echelons of society there was less gorging in the seediness of the whole case, but still a fair amount of hand-wringing. What is wrong with our systems? How could this awful thing happen in such a nice place? Not much could be done, however, a government investigation was initiated and that was about that (the investigation would report mostly nonsense six months later when the media commotion had died down). 

The young journalist who broke the news was widely feted. He was nominated for journalism awards and was invited to hold speeches about the case. If journalism is to be judged by its societal impact he clearly deserved all available prizes. But if the goal of journalism is to truthfully report about the world he was not as successful. Almost everything in the story was false. 

Will the real Ystad Family please stand up

Most of Sweden is still blissfully unaware of the fact that this story is fake to the core. Tove and I know for certain that it is since we spent almost a year proving beyond doubt that it is. 

When we first heard of the Ystad Family from the news we were skeptical. Knowing a thing or two about Swedish child protection services, we were not convinced. The whole story was over the top and thus very likely to have been spiced up. Not by the media, they lacked imagination for something like that, but by the social services. There was also the disturbing fact that the eldest daughter in the family vehemently defended her parents and asserted that the accusations against the family were false. The social services argued that the daughter was brainwashed by her parents, but this always seemed like a very weak defense. 

It was not our argument to make, however, and when news reporting about the case died down our interest in it died too. This all changed in the beginning of 2021. That was when we were contacted by the parents of the Ystad Family. They asked us to write a book about their case. This was surprising to us, but maybe not as surprising as it is to you. Tove and I had previously written a book about the social services in Sweden which has been appreciated by victims of these services. If the Ystad Family wanted obsequious writers we were a natural place to start. 

We agreed to write a book about them. But only if they gave us every document they could obtain about their case. They agreed and we started working. 

Swedish social services always keep an internal record of their cases. These internal records are not really intended to ever leave the office of the social services. They are intended for internal use so that multiple social workers can cooperate on one case. This is also what makes the records so valuable to an outside investigator. While the reports the social services hand out, for example to the administrative court, might be cherrypicked or plain lying, the internal records always keep somewhat to the truth, if only because it is very difficult to lie successfully on the fly. The internal records are heavily classified but according to Swedish law one is always entitled to see one’s own records. And parents are generally entitled to see their children’s records. And in the case of the Ystad Family the parents handed these over to us. 

The Y-files

Getting hold of the internal records for the children of the Ystad Family was a coup of major proportions. This is what the legions of journalists that descended upon Ystad in the summer of 2019 dreamed of obtaining. Now it was one and half years later, but it still felt like a significant triumph that we, two nobodies, got exclusive rights to this information that so many real journalists had fought over. 

And what information it was. The records proved every suspicion we might have had when we read the news. And then some. 

This was not just a tragic case of child maltreatment. It was not even an unfortunate case of misunderstanding between parents and social services. It was a miscarriage of justice. And the media had not only missed it, they had aided and abetted it. It was a scandal of large proportions. 

What the internal records showed was that the children of the Ystad Family were originally investigated for not attending school. They were homeschooled, which in Sweden is not allowed except for exceptional circumstances, circumstances that the authorities suspected were not present. This investigation was languid, moving very slowly forward over several months. 

Then one of the children, a 13-year old boy, was invited to the social services office for an interview. From the records from this interview it is obvious that the boy is autistic, at least for anyone who knows anything about autism. But social workers seldomly know much about autism. Instead they were alarmed by his incoherent replies to their questions and his gaunt appearance. 

A telephone call to a doctor who had treated another of the children and the cancellation of a home visit (due to stomach flu, according to the parents) sealed the fate of the Ystad Family. The social workers decided that these children were most probably malnourished, maltreated and forbidden to leave the family home. They had to be saved. Immediately. 

Social workers with police assistance stormed the house of the Ystad Family with the objective of apprehending the children and bringing them to a safe care home. This is where problems started to arise. According to the internal records the children were not chained in the basement. They were playing video games. And they were not at all happy to be saved. Even worse, the children were taken for medical examinations, which showed that all of them were healthy and well-nourished. 

Somewhere here the social workers should probably have concluded that they made a mistake. The right thing to do had been to drive the children home again, issue an apology and ask if there was anything else they could help with. 

This they did not do. Instead they doubled down. The original accusations against the parents would clearly not stand. But instead they gathered a new bunch of accusations, something that was easy now that the children were in residential care, guarded and monitored by allies of the social workers.

A country, taken for a ride 

During the next few weeks the social workers were feverishly adding to the internal records. From these several hundred pages they selected tidbits of information that were compiled into an application to the court. The application was a hit job, a smear campaign, composed to make the parents look the very worst. 

As an example, the social workers picked out an incident where one of the smaller children told a care worker that they used to eat raw carrots at home. In the application this was described as if this was all the children ate at home. In this the social workers disregarded not only information from the other children, but also their very own observations; when they came to remove the children the mother stood by the kitchen range making dinner, according to the records. 

The story behind the banana is similar. The social workers picked out one single incident where the 13-year old boy asked for help with peeling a banana. They left out all the other information explaining that due to his autism he abhorred banana peels and therefore would not peel bananas himself. This might not technically be lying, but everyone would agree it is very dishonest behavior. Coming from a government agency it is nothing but outrageous.

The administrative courts see smear campaigns from the social services all the time. They expect it and they are used to it. But journalists are not. What happened here was that a journalist stumbled over a smear campaign without realizing it was a smear campaign. He took the court documents at face value and thought he had discovered a uniquely perverted family. The public, who had even less experience of the inner workings of social services and administrative courts, believed it even more. A public sensation was born. 

Maybe the social workers in Ystad were worried when their fabricated case suddenly became national news. In the internal records there are noted instructions to the care homes to at all cost “protect” the children from reporters and journalists who might want to talk to them. 

If they were worried what might happen if the children’s own stories became public they had nothing to fear. The media, and even more the public, bought the story as presented in the court documents at face value. No reporters tried to contact the children. And no reporters questioned the social services' version of what had happened. Maybe because they knew what their readers wanted. The readers wanted villains, and they wanted them punished. 

Public enemies number one and two

When the first article about the Ystad Family was published it had a very clear perpetrator in the form of the parents. The parents did not exactly help their case. Some days before the publication the journalist had contacted the mother and asked her for a statement. She answered that they were the victims of a legal scandal but that it was too complicated to explain all the details so she had to decline comment. The whole dialogue was printed in the article. It made her look both guilty and slightly mad. 

Overall the parents’ media strategy was abysmal. After the pre-publication statement they declined all further comments only stating that they cooperated with the social services. Which of course suited the media just fine. They had found their villains and the villains confirmed their guilt by not parrying. 

The story was thus set and the reporters’ only job was to heap more fuel on the fire. The public demanded a fire, the problem was rather that fuel was thin on the ground. Neither the social services, nor the parents said anything and most relevant documents were classified. 

Too good not to lie about

There were still places where the journalists could find new information. The school board in Ystad was one such place. In the court documents the parents were accused of lying to the school board by claiming that the children attended a fancy American online school. 

In the school board’s documents the school in question could be identified as Laurel Springs School in Ojai, California. Laurel Springs is an exclusive private school offering personal online tuition at a hefty fee. Swedish media hurriedly contacted Laurel Springs and made them publicly deny that any children from Ystad had ever attended their school. 

But at the same time they ignored other vital information from the documents of the school board. Namely that the parents had never claimed that their children attended Laurel Springs. They only said that they followed the syllabus and bought literature from Laurel Springs. Here was clear proof that the social services lied or at least heavily distorted their statements to the court. Yet no media dared to raise the question. The public did not want proof of bureaucratic shenanigans. They wanted villainy exposed. 

It seems that sometimes the old journalist saying “never check a good story” really is true. But in this case it should more be “ignore everything that contradicts a good story”. When the story was already established everyone knew what to expect. The readers who clicked on these articles expected contrite apologies from hapless bureaucrats who had been deceived by the villainous parents. They did not expect, and would probably have rebelled against, any articles that deviated from this mold. 

A conscientious journalist had very few alternatives. At this time there might have been clear indications that something was not right in the story as told by the social services. But there was no other story to present either. The most prudent thing to do would have been to not write anything at all about it, which the majority of journalists certainly did. But since the public demanded more they had to be given more. And the only workable way was to give them more of the same, even if it meant riding roughshod over the truth. 

The exorbitant cost of courage

It is clearly difficult to go against an established narrative. At least when you have nothing better to present. But if you have some unique information proving your alternative version, that would shift the tables, right?

Not really. Five months after the first articles about the Ystad Family the commotion had completely died down. This is when one of Sweden’s major TV channels entered the fray. They had made a documentary about the family and had obtained the rights to interview the parents. Now this might change perceptions among the public. 

In the end it did not. Tove and I talked quite a lot with the reporter doing the documentary. She said that she had interviewed local people who stated on camera that they used to see the oldest daughter in the family jogging around the village. But her editors had cut out all such interviews and replaced them with others that claimed they had never seen the family outside their property. 

Apparently the editors did not dare go the whole way in confronting the public’s perceptions of the case. The documentary had nothing new to present but the interview with the parents. And even that was a step too far. The parents looked decent enough and their house looked like a normal house. The result was an outcry, both on public forums and in newspaper columns. To give monsters like these a venue to showcase their normalcy was beyond naive, it was immoral. 

Freelancers to the rescue

Tove and I were aware of all this when we were invited to the case more than a year later. But it was different for us. We had all the source material. We knew what had really happened and we could prove it beyond reasonable doubt. We hoped it would make all the difference. 

The fact is that it did not. Almost as soon as we had flipped through the several thousand pages of classified internal records, and realized that this was a very real scandal, we tried to contact the media. The response was disappointing. Hardly anyone replied. And those who did had their own agenda, like the TV reporter mentioned above who listened politely and even looked at some of the records but who really only wanted an interview with the eldest daughter who was now over 18 and had moved back to her family. 

It came as quite a surprise to us that there was no interest in this case. A major reason that we had accepted to write about the Ystad Family was that we thought we were more or less guaranteed an audience. Apparently not. I still do not know why we were rebuffed by every media outlet. But I have my suspicions. 

Since all media in Sweden reported about the Ystad Family when it happened, all media in Sweden was also complicit in the character assassination. To report anything new would be the same thing as admitting that they were wrong in their previous reporting. And not only would they admit their own fault, knowing what had happened to the TV reporter that had tried to put some nuance to the story they could be fairly certain they would be attacked by other media that had also been wrong in their previous reporting. 

We concluded that the media was corrupt and decided to write the story down as a book. No one could stop us from taking the case directly to the public. Except the public of course. It turns out there was very little interest in an old case of child maltreatment. We were not helped by the fact that by this stage we had made enemies of the Ystad Family itself, having written things about them that they did not approve of. No help with marketing from that quarter. And the media of course refused even the slightest mention of our book.

But it was not just a case of failed marketing. It was not just the media that was corrupt, it was people themselves. The few people who did read our book, or at least heard about it, showed their disdain openly. We were accused of being paid off by the family. And if we were not doing it for money we definitely had an anti-government agenda or similar ulterior motives. People did all sorts of things to prove to themselves that they had not been taken for a ride and that the world really was as deviated as they had always imagined. 

Truth be told

The story of the Ystad Family is a story about a lying media, for sure. But it is also a story about a public that wants to be lied to. In the end all media, including news media, is about entertainment. People want to be entertained, they want to be taken for an exciting ride, even by the news.

The story of the Ystad Family is also a story about this blog. After our failure with the Ystad Family Tove made a vow never to write so much as a postcard for the Swedish market again. Instead she started this English-language blog and press ganged me to join her. Nowadays, this is where we write the truth. And hopefully a good story too. 

Postscript: The story about the story

The impetus for this article came when Tove read Scott Alexander’s posts about the non-lying media and wanted to write a reply that at the same time explained our story with the Ystad Family. For different reasons this simple idea went through numerous complete re-writes. The final result has my name on it but in reality we have written it together. 

The last draft had actually got rid of all references to Scott Alexander. But then two days ago one of Tove’s previous articles was unexpectedly included on Scott’s link list for February. This led to a sudden 50% increase in subscribers. As a courtesy to Scott, and to make all our new readers from ACX feel welcome, the connection to the discussion at ACX was revived.