A while back I wrote about a BDSM organisation, The Mansion, in Sweden that got accused with running a sex club in a local news paper.
The journalist confused the owner of the establishment and the BDSM organisation and wrongfully connected those two. The owner of the establishment is allowing the BDSM organisation to rent her buildings now and then when they have gatherings. The Mansion is a BDSM-organisation that is run and owned by its members.
The owner of the establishment has taken this to court, claiming that the newspaper article was nothing else than slandering. The newspaper of course still claims that they have done nothing wrong.
The owner has taken a hit due to the newspaper article. People and organisations have bailed out on their bookings so she stand a fair chance of winning the case. Especially when the article was full of mixed up facts and pure gossip.
Nothing has changed and as I wrote before: Every newspaper thinks it has the right to abuse people as soon they smell sex and things that are outside the norm.
This is a link to the newspaper’s latest article on the development: Nerrikes allehanda
Here is a link to my original post regarding this matter: Something is brewing in the Kingdom of Sweden
It’s sad that the media thinks they can get away with this sort of thing, and even worse that they usually can. Too few people stand up to papers or news stations when they begin reporting misinformation about things like this, and a lot of the time when they do, they are misquoted or ignored completely. We had something along these lines happen in my hometown (Louisville, Ky). Construction workers that are renovating a row of historic buildings downtown known as Whiskey Row unearthed what used to be the location of a local kink group called LATEX (Louisville area trust EXchange). At first the media was calling it a sex club, and the words torture, weird and disturbing were used repeatedly in the article on the station’s website. The amazing thing is, when the local community began emailing them and posting on their FB and Twitter, and when one of the original founding members came forward to set them strait, they listened. They posted a second article with their interview with this person, name withheld, and quoted him properly. Now the city is planning to preserve some of the things they found as a part of Louisville’s history. After one too many stories like the one you wrote about,. it was nice to see this handled the way it was. I hope everything works out for them!
The printed media in many countries now only survives by printing ‘stories’, rather than reporting facts which is done faster on-line. In consequence anything which the editor thinks salacious is far more likely to appear in print than a careful, well researched and thoughful article which will stretch the reader’s intellect.
So stories about such ‘shocking’ subjects as the BDSM world are far more likely to appear as leading articles. Facts? Immaterial as most editors think we hide under slimy rocks and would never emerge to defend our lifestyle – in a way they are right. Unless you are uber rich, a VIP or a celeb, it’s not worth taking on newspapers; so most people shrug their shoulders and carry on regtardless of any libels about them.
Where the Swedish story becomes interesting is the fact that the coomplainant is apparently not involved with the BDSM world other than renting out space, and is suing because she has been linked to our kink. As far as the paper is concerned it uses an Orwellian concept of extended guilt by association.
All this unsavoury bickering does is to bear out the fact that sex sells papers, and the more shocking the story, the more papers get sold. If this trend continues 90% of the printed press will be run along the lines of UK’s old ‘News of the World’ where the most active part of the set-up was the newspaper’s legal department.