Finnish PM censors awkward news

[Askold]

I'm trying to find English version of this story but having trouble so far.

Here's the original story in Finnish: http://suomenkuvalehti.fi/jutut/kotimaa/paaministeri-sipila-vaiensi-ylen-uutisten-johto-hyllytti-sipila-jutut-ruben-stiller-sai-varoituksen/

Here's my take on it: Some background first. One of the main stories in Finnish news has been a controversy over the Prime Minister Sipilä. It turned out that one of the companies that makes money from the highly controversial and failing Talvivaara mine is connected to Sipilä and due to conflict of interests he should not have been involved in decicions that gave wealthy government contracts to a company that his children have money in (and which had been founded by his grandpa and PM himself may still own a part of the company.)

The thing that got to the news now is that Sipilä, furious about the accusations contacted our state owned media YLE and demanded that they stop talking about his connections and the management complied and shut down the several stories about it that were still in development. This type of censorship is not within the values of a proper democracy. The story about this was first revealed in another magazine/website who made the story after several YLE reporters contacted them.

Now YLE management is defending their decision saying that just because they do whatever the PM tells them to do it does not mean that they are taking orders from him...

[Askold]

The Prime minister has tried to downplay the importance of his interference with media...  He also went on to threaten to shut down the YLE completely when a reporter asked a question the PM didn't want to answer.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the world does not consider this to be a minor joking matter:



Right now there are two major news stories about Finland. This controversy over PM and the Neo-Nazi marching in our capital city today... The latter story has raised enough awareness that tourists are being warned to stay away.

[ironbite]

Trump wishes he could do that here right now.

[TheContrarian]

Trump wishes he could do that here right now.

Ironic, since wikileaks exposed the Clinton campaign doing exactly that.

But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good fantasy right?

[Tolpuddle Martyr]

Trump wishes he could do that here right now.

Ironic, since wikileaks exposed the Clinton campaign doing exactly that.

But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good fantasy right?

The Clinton Campaign forced NPR to stop talking about those emails? Because we are talking about governments forcing national broadcasters to stop reporting critical news, right?

Well, somebody isn't letting facts get in the way of their fantasy of the week!

[Askold]

Currently YLE more and more important employees are resigning because they cannot condone what they are being ordered to do, one of them specifically said that he is resigning due to differences in what he and his boss consider "freedom of speech."

EDIT: https://rsf.org/en/news/reporters-without-borders-rsf-remains-concerned-about-actions-taken-national-broadcaster-yle Finland is still ranked NUMBER ONE in press freedom so finding out that one of our biggest media houses is doing something like this may put us down a few spots in the future.