Tabloid media under fire over bikini festival photos
Danish social media has this week seen an uproar over articles produced by the tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet which feature photos of young women wearing swimwear at music festivals.
The photos are taken at the festivals and do not appear to be illegal, since Danish laws permit members of the public to be photographed in the public space.
But Ekstra Bladet has been slammed on social media such as Instagram for compiling the photos in articles, which it then puts behind a paywall and invites potential subscribers to sign up.
The newspaper has various types of content on its website and is capable of producing quality journalism. I have a lot of admiration for its series of reporting on foreign residents caught up in strict immigration rules.
It now stands accused of monetising and sexualising members of the public attending summer festivals.
New reality series one of Denmark’s bleakest ever
In 2016, DR TV broadcast a reality series called Prinsesser fra Blokken, “Princesses from the Block”. It followed several teenage girls from marginalised housing areas in the outer Copenhagen “Vestegn” or western suburbs.
The original series was an ultimately uplifting look at how the young girls coped with histories of abuse and difficult childhoods by coming together as friends, pursuing their own interests, personalities and hopes, with a fair bit of youthful partying thrown in.
A new series entitled “Princesses from the Block: Eight Years Later” was released this week. It catches up with most of the original participants who are now in their twenties, but the feel-good stories are few and far between. Several are now battling addiction and worsening personal problems.
The reality-documentary genre in Denmark generally keeps within the confines of “hygge” and comfortable viewing. Perhaps that’s what makes this particular series standout: it is uncompromisingly bleak and raw, and arguably one of the most revealing and talked-about shows about Danish society this year.
Why is changing retirement age in 2070 such a big deal?
The beginning of August is a time when all the political parties return from their summer holidays and attend conferences known as sommergruppemøder, at which they present their fresh agendas ahead of the coming political season.
Parties often try to grab the headlines and steer the narrative with their new strategies by pronouncing new or remarkable policies. Notable examples this week include the Moderates talking about fertility rates and the Liberals arguing for the return of a popular, but scrapped tax deduction.
The winners so far though are the Social Democrats and Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. The PM said she wants to move away from a longstanding schedule under which the retirement age will be raised over the coming decades.
A political agreement from 2006 means that the age of retirement – when people qualify for the state pension – is raised bit by bit. People born in the 1990s will be well into their seventies by the time they retire, should the plan hold.
Designed to increase the retirement age along with rising life expectancies, parliament must vote to approve the schedule every few years.
The next vote on this is due in 2025, when it is expected to confirm that the retirement age will reach 70 by 2040.
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But that’s where Frederiksen wants the existing schedule to end, saying the 2006 agreement needs to be rebooted.
That doesn’t sound like an overly controversial policy and one likely to chime well with the Social Democrats’ base of working voters, but it has already received strong pushback, especially from conservative parties and business groups.
That’s because the 2006 deal very specifically guarantees Denmark’s labour supply over coming decades, giving a predictable base for economic planning, according to experts.
Removing it puts all this into doubt. This is the reason for the strong reaction to Frederiksen’s plan, rather than a reluctance to let people retire earlier.
“A very large amount of society’s economy rests on that [2006] agreement,” as economics professor Torben M. Andersen, who was involved in the formation of the deal 18 years ago, told broadcaster DR.
“It’s this specific solution that means Denmark is one of the best-prepared countries for an older population,” he said.
The Social Democrats are likely to have to do a lot of convincing to get the rest of the coalition government and opposition parties to go along with the plan.
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