There has been some quite animated debate in the Swedish media and in the Swedish blogsphere lately around the mainsteam media bias on the reporting from the devastation in the US caused by hurricane Katrina.

A lot of this debate was centered around an article written by Roland Poirier Martinsson in the Swedish tabloid Expressen a couple of days ago. It accused the Swedish journalists of being unprofessional in their bias against the US. The absence of balance, or of bias in favour of the US, was pointed out.

The same type of discussion takes place in the US. In the August 29th issue of The New Yorker (article not on-line), journalist Nicholas Lehmann introduces Hugh Hewitt, a leading candidate to be the ‘Most Famous Conservative Journalist Whom Liberals Have Never Heard Of’.

Hugh Hewitt is an author, columnist, radio talk show host, and blogger. Furthermore he is conservative, and religious (catholic turned presbyterian). More than one striking parallel to Roland Martinsson!

His radio talk show, ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show’, attracts attention by high level politicians and journalists.

The premise of the article is to report on a trend in the media driven from a conservative side. Hugh Hewitt is not only admitting to be biased in his texts - he questions the division between news and opinion, and also between reporting and press criticism. He wants liberal journalists in the mainstream media to admit that they too are biased.

Some of the sentiment can be gleaned from a qoute from a recent column in the on-line version of the Weekly Standard;

Despite the near monolithic chant of the mainstream media that the disaster in New Orleans was Bush’s fault, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll revealed that outside of Andrew Sullivan and Daily Kos, the vast majority of Americans aren’t buying the latest fever fresh from the swamp. It is no longer a question of running an end-run around media elites–it is a question of whether media elites have any purpose other than to amuse savvy news consumers.

Other Hugh Hewitt reading for internet consumers can be found both at his own blog or in an on-line magazine, Beyond The News.

It is interesting to see that conservative criticism of the media, or MSM - Main Stream Media, is based on a similar premise in the USA and in Sweden; Media is dominated by liberals (in Sweden leftists), and is therefore imposing a bias that is taken for balance and impartiality because no opposition to that view takes place.

Conservatives are thus employing alternate ways to propagate a counterweight point-of-view. Hugh Hewitt’s reach of about seven hundred thousand listeners has no real counterpart in Sweden, but the blogging phenomenon is similar, especially when coupled with regular columns in newspapers and on-line publications.

Read and be delighted or infuriated!