Johannes Wahlström

Johannes Wahlström is a Swedish journalist and filmmaker.
Background and career
Wahlström was born in 1981. His father is the writer Israel Shamir. Wahlström says he grew up in Jaffa, Moscow, and Stockholm. After completing his master's thesis in media and communication at the at Stockholm University Wahlström founded with the website IMEMC.
Work
Wahlström has worked as a journalist in Ukraine, Russia, and Palestine on behalf of Aftonbladet, Journalisten and Fria Tidningar and has worked with freedom of speech related issues for the Alternative information centre in the Palestinian territories and the Swedish Institute in Russia.
Cablegate
Wahlström played an active role in the leak of US state department cables known as Cablegate that was released by WikiLeaks. Being the only Swedish journalist with full access to the WikiLeaks material he produced articles and TV-programs for among others SVD, Aftonbladet and Dokument inifrån at Swedish Television. In the SR program Studio Ett he was interviewed as a representative of Wikileaks, during which he criticized Swedish media for having a power dependent view of the world.
Freedom of speech related issues
In October 2013, Wahlström's documentary film Mediastan premiered at the Raindance Film Festival in London. The festival described the documentary as "essential viewing for any media student as well as individuals concerned about democracy."
In November 2010, Wahlström and the journalist Dan Josefsson initiated an exposé over the monopolistic tendencies of the Swedish media conglomerate Bonnier. The investigation lasted for a week, in the form of articles in the largest Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.
In December 2009, Johannes Wahlström became the spokesperson for the independent magazine union Samarbetet. The Initiative was launched as a protest against the largest Swedish newspaper distributor, Tidsam, which was claimed to discriminate against newspapers that were not part of its media holdings.
In 2008, as the editor of the magazine Tromb, Wahlström exposed corruption in the Swedish ministry of foreign affairs, and later made an exposé of the head of the magazine.
In 2005, he wrote an article describing the ways in which Swedish media censor their news reports of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The article was heavily criticized in the Swedish media after two of the six journalists that Wahlström had interviewed claimed to have been misquoted.

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