Survey Finds Blacks Overrepresented in Swedish TV Advertising, as Media Focus on White Majority

At over a quarter of its 10-million-strong population, Sweden has the highest percentage of people with an immigrant background in entire Scandinavia, which fuels an endless media debate on inclusion, representation and bias.

A new study has indicated that Africans are greatly over-represented compared to other groups on Swedish television.

According to the study, called “Who can be seen on the air in colour-blind Sweden?” by the Institute for Media Studies, blacks are visible to a greater extent than their real share in the Swedish population in the prime time study on SVT1 and TV4, the country's most-seen channels.

In TV commercials, as many as one in ten faces is black, whereas the assumed proportion of blacks in the Swedish population is approximately 3-4 percent.

“The advertisers have obviously decided that black faces are good to include,” the researchers concluded.

While Africans are seemingly over-represented, other groups are closer to their population shares. However, people whom the study categorically labelled as having a background in the Middle East were, by contrast, underrepresented compared to their share of the population.

Furthermore, when it comes to the media companies themselves, the much-praised and sought-after diversity is conspicuously absent. Having examined the ten largest media groups' top leadership, boards and CEOs, the researchers found that very few of them actually are foreign-born or have a foreign background. Only a single board member was born outside Europe, whereas of the many Swedish-born executives, only a single person had two foreign-born parents, the study underlined.

However, while covering the study, the Swedish media instead chose to focus on white majority seen in the ads, which made Institute for Media Studies director Lars Truedson and Sayaka Osanami Törngren, associate professor at Malmö University, see red over angled coverage. They argued that the media chose to “bury” the conclusion that non-whites are seen on TV as well.

“We think these results in the TV survey are interesting. But they were rejected when SVT and Swedish Radio interviewed us about the matter. There, it was only said that whites are most common, which is almost a matter of course in a country where so where three out of four are white. The fact that blacks are seen so often is probably because they are more interesting for the audience,” they wrote in their opinion piece in the trade newspaper Dagens Media. “This is exciting – and likely quite typical of the Swedish discussion about representation for minorities,” they concluded.

According to previous research by the same crew, about a quarter of commercials had at least one non-white person in them.

At 25.9 percent, Sweden has the highest percentage of people with an immigrant background in all of Scandinavia, which is a perennial source of media debate about inclusion, representation and bias. In the words of Institute for Media Studies director Lars Truedson, “This area is hotly debated, full of conflicts and almost void of current media research and political proposals.”

Syrians and Iraqis are currently the largest non-Swedish population groups at less than 2 percent each.