Portrayals of Scandinavians in the media

My bias, if it isn’t already, should be clear. I’m in a committed partnership with a Scandinavian man and will spend a good chunk of 2008 living in Copenhagen. With my own strong Norwegian heritage as cred outside my relationship, I’d offer that what I’ve found is mostly common sense if you have any awareness of cultural stereotypes - and in one case, you only need the ability to look at a map. Most of these advertising and journalistic blunders are obvious if you take the time to consider them and can feel insulting to anyone.

Play the CitiCard commercial

At first, I found the Citibank CitiCard ad rather charming. “How nice the homeland looks,” I thought. When the father suggests that he feels like yodeling, I realized some marketing intern had misidentified a mountain region or hadn’t bothered to do a web search for the word. Then I realized, even if you don’t know anything about basic geography, you can see from any atlas, globe, or online mapping resource that taking a boat to Stockholm from Norway is completely nonsensical. In order to sail from Norway to eastern Sweden, travelers would be forced to ride down and around the entire Scandinavian peninsula, cutting through the waters (Skagerrak, Kattegat, Oresund, and the Baltic Sea, respectively) between Denmark and Sweden. Did these advertisers assume those with viking blood would rather ride around on inconvenient ships than take a train? And that Americans of Scandinavian descent don’t do research before going in search of their heritage, which somehow involves purchasing sweaters? This commercial is not only dumb; it is offensive to every ethnic group mentioned.

Play the AT&T SmartPhone commercial

Who in the world thought this was a good idea? Sven, giant personal Swede at your service, is being compared with the usefulness of a cell phone? I suppose they can’t use a person of color lest they be accused of racism, but then what can you label this? Cultural ignorance? A joke? Those excuses don’t hold much weight in other instances of discrimination. I guess they’re assuming tall Caucasians won’t cause too much trouble over some silly commercials since they’re so busy ice fishing.

Another finding of late is a glaring mistake in the December 2007 issue of American Vogue. I wanted to applaud the magazine’s effort to highlight cultural delicacies without fetishizing The Other, but within even the first sentence of their piece on a “Scandinavian fish tradition,” glaring errors appear. The article focuses on Norway - not the Scandinavian region at large - and instead of fact-checking their grammar, the German and Swedish words for the dish in question were used. Mixing up Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish is at times excusable since these three dialects are extremely similar. But including German in the mix is just stupid, as is an editor’s inability to cross-check a crucial words in a story.

For clarification, “lax” is the Swedish word for salmon, “lachs” is German, and the actual Norwegian/Danish word is “laks.” “Grav” is at correct (the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish word), but “gravlax” is thereby also Swedish since it employs the incorrect “lax.”
I get that it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Cultural bias rarely does when it isn’t your own. But these kinds of seriously negligent or perhaps blatant errors are probably expected to be cute and are instead awkward and offensive. They’re also way too easy to spot. Isn’t advertising supposed to be subversive?