STIEG CAMPAIGNED for many years to have the Swedish Constitution hold the Internet to the same level of accountability demanded of all other media, namely, the obligation to have a legally responsible publisher. He got nowhere. The result is that even today, racist and fascist websites that incite hatred and threaten innocent people are still beyond the reach of the law.
In June 2004, Stieg raised this question at a conference in Paris presented by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), an ad hoc organization under the United Nations Charter and the world’s largest security-oriented intergovernmental body. The OSCE, which comprises fifty-six states in Europe, Central Asia, and North America, describes itself as “a forum for political negotiations and decision-making in the fields of early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.” During this conference, Stieg spoke out against the danger of leaving the Internet beyond the reach of all legislation. “For racist groups,” he said, “cyberspace is a dream. It’s no accident that their first priority is to set up a website.” But he also warned against considering the law as the sole effective remedy: “In my opinion, legislation alone cannot defeat the challenge posed by hate propaganda on the Internet. In fact I appeal to you: do not put too much trust in legislation.”
Stieg felt that without the democratic activism of politicians and citizens (whose ranks include journalists), legislation would never get at the root of the problem, and he was very worried that if nothing was done, the situation was doomed to deteriorate even further.
The Millennium Trilogy accuses the media of gradually abdicating their responsibilities toward society throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Investigative journalists had turned away from social problems, and financial reporters treated CEOs like rock stars, allowing them to quietly enrich themselves through dummy corporations, hefty bonuses, and cartels. That fluid border between businesses and the print media also led many journalists to become public relations directors for big companies. At the beginning of the trilogy, in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist describes, in his portrait of William Borg, everything Stieg criticized on that score: Borg had left journalism, “and now he worked in P.R. as a consultant—for a considerably higher salary—at a firm.” Stieg never sold himself for money or to further his career.
STIEG PUT his entire code of journalistic ethics into The Millennium Trilogy. And he showed his respect for the reader. “It doesn’t matter how many advertisers we have,” Mikael tells Henrik Vanger, “if no one wants to buy the magazine.” Stieg adamantly championed what every newspaper and magazine owes its readers: the search for the truth. But since he also thought a publication should not sacrifice everything to its readers, he objected to putting rape victims through more suffering by splashing their private lives all over magazines. In the trilogy, he strongly and sarcastically condemns the ever more offensive tactics of this kind, such as the newspaper headlines calling Lisbeth and her friends a “lesbian Satanist gang.” And when Mikael Blomkvist solves the mystery of Harriet Vanger’s disappearance, he faces a huge problem of conscience. Should he be a good reporter and tell the entire story—at the risk of exposing Harriet to public scrutiny? Or should he keep quiet, thus concealing the truth, despite the financial windfall such a scoop would mean to Millennium?
After a long and painful inner struggle, Mikael’s conscience wins out over his ego as a reporter: he will not publish the story. This passage was of great importance to Stieg, because he sincerely wanted to send a message, but when I first read the text I disagreed with what he’d written. In that first version, when Mikael finds Harriet out in Australia, she exclaims almost in terror, “So now that you know I’m alive—what are you going to do? Are you going to rape me too?” I felt that readers would take those last words too literally and think Harriet was completely paranoid. Since Stieg was convinced I was wrong, we had argument after argument about this. In the end, he never said, “Okay, I’ll change it.” He never said anything. But he took out that sentence.
IN THE opening of the first book, after being accused of not verifying the evidence he uses for an exposé of the industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, Mikael Blomkvist quits his job as the publisher of Millennium because he’s afraid that otherwise, readers will lose confidence in the magazine. Later, before he makes public the valid proof that has been gathered by Dag Svensson, he checks all this information with obsessive care. I know that behavior well from having watched Stieg at work, and he really did feel that sources were sacred—which is why Mikael erases from his computer all the files revealing any sources before the police arrive, after Dag and Mia have been murdered. And it makes clearer today why, after Stieg’s death, no one in his personal circle, myself included, wanted to say anything about the computer he was using. Besides the fourth Millennium novel in progress, it contained the names and contact information of his informants on the far right. And on this point, the Swedish constitution is clear: sources must be protected!