4. The reasons behind the campaign?

I can only speculate about the reasons, but of course many people ask why starting such a campain? The reason why seems to be a desire to damage the Energy Agency’s reputation and especially perhaps certain specific people (paying back for old grudges), as well as to purge people with environmental and climate expertise for energy policy reasons.

Then there also seems to be a fear that I could do a different gas analysis than my predecessor. In this work behind the campaigne, several people at the Energy Agency have been mapped, and I was, as far as I understand, only the first person on the list. Mainly it seems to be about people who were/are active within the green party.[1]

In the magazine Svenska Dagbladet 7/4 -2024, Boethius and another person from Timbro write about my case:

‘It is imortant to point out that the responsibility lies within the Energy Agency. The agency has been acting very dangerously. The issue raises seroius questions regarding if the agency manage to deal with its role as responsible for Sweden’s gas supply. Despite considerable public education efforts, the message about the crucial role of gas supply for the nation does not seem to have fully been registered within the agency. This can reasonably only happen in an organization where basic facts about the functioning of the energy system are overshadowed by considerations of whether an energy source is politically desirable or not.’

The link ‘public education efforts’ leads to advertising for Boethius own book on the matter. When DN later confronts Boethius, he says that he is ‘doing the authority’s job from the outside’.[2]

So what is a media campagne?

I googled a bit online and this was the first thing that came up (from http://nathatshjalpen.se/):

‘A media campaigne is negative news about a person/organization/institution that is under great media coverage by leading media and journalists where the angle of the news is one-sided. The consequence of this is that everyone is unanimous in their criticism and the chance for the person/organization/institution to respond to the criticism or nuance the conversation is very small. One-sided means that the news is presented in a similar way in all places where the news is mentioned. The news in itself is that the person/organization/institution has violated a norm or is perceived to be violating a norm. The result of this one-sided coverage is unclear – it could, for example, lead to someone resigning or apologizing, or an investigation being started.

Research into how different media movements have been organized in Sweden shows that it is often about individuals and their transgressions of norms rather than paying attention to the politics, organization or institution they represent. Research also shows that media drives hit women harder.’

Wikipedia says:

‘The term media hunt describes how the media, similar to a hunt, collectively pursue a particular story for a period, effectively cooperating in the development of primarily political scandals.

In research, the term media scandal is used to refer to instances where coverage shifts to a point where journalism begins to describe what has happened in a similar manner, with consensus emerging that someone has acted in a morally questionable way.