This is a brief follow-up post for my recent not so much exercise-related post regarding Finland. This is just to indicate that although Finland ranks pretty well in many areas of equality, freedom, justice and wellbeing, it was a dissapointment that Finland ranks now only 4th in World Press Freedom Index.
Finland ranked first in the World Press Freedom Index for the past five years, but now Norway is the first and Sweden second. Finland suffers in this index from the actions of our Prime Minister, who made quite some actions of harassment against few state TV journalists. Our Prime minister Juha Sipilä is very wealthy man due to his former enterprise career, but he is (as maybe some other persons with similar history) very concerned with his public picture. There has actually been quite a few instances with him that are fairly similar to this clear harassment case, but we just have to hope he has finally figured out how to behave himself in the future.
The other journalist that resigned from her position due to Prime Minister’s actions was Salla Vuorikoski. She was hired by a leading Finnish magazine that I also subscribe and I am extremely happy that she now writes her stories there. She is namely one of the best if not the best Finnish journalists, whose articles are well-researched and highly interesting.
Vuorikoski also quite frequently writes about things related to Finnish Sports organizations and their finance. She has researched and revealed many grazy things related to Finnish Sports organizations, even clear corruption cases that happen behind the scenes also in Finland.
Thes are the journalists we need, who are not afraid of revealing and putting things forward.
So there is still room for improvements, also in Finland. And I am not writing this to say we have a bad Prime Minister, but because I can. Freedom of speech is namely one of the strongest and most-respected principles in Finland. It is the only way for developement and we all should be able to work and live in environments where we do need to be afraid of saying what we think.
Of course you cannot say just whathever, as it is not wise for instance to insult someone. Nevertheless, freedom of speech has been one of the key principles of Finnish and Nordic thinking at least since the year 1776, when Anders Chydenius started to act as one of the strongest advocates of freedom of expression.
