I'm reading Hvor fritt et land? (How Free a Nation?) by Hans Fredrik Dahl and Henrik G. Bastiansen, on the changing conditions for freedom of speech in Norway through the 20th century. They look not only at official censorship and control of movies and broadcasting, (still in effect, though much less actively used), but also at limitations on speech caused by the uniformity and, until a few decades ago, often strict party control of the press. As only the freedom of the press was protected (or seen as protected) by our constitution (article 100), and that press was controlled by the parties, this served to discourage open debate on many issues. Believe it or not, from World War 2 to the Vietnam war, the Norwegian media was as uniformly in support of the US as it today is against it. This quote, then, from the 1952 first edition of the dissenting anti-NATO, anti-US newspaper Orientering (Orientation) sounds familiar:

The most important principle of democracy - openness in all questions - is being replaced by a dangerous uniformity of the press and news services. The people is thus deprived of its most important opinion building source of knowledge, and its free exchange of opinion. Freedom of press and speech is practically a fiction. This is dangerous. An impression is made of agreement and cooperation, while in reality the truth is hidden from the people, and dissenting views are repressed. [..]

There is a concern and something brewing among the people. It seeks clarity and expression, but does not receive this in the press. This is particularly so with our foreign policy. The newspapers have their regular foreign news editors, the broadcasting its regular weekly commentators - often the same as the newspapers. They usually have the same basic views on foreign policy issues. The many who have, more or less, come to doubt and disagree with these views, seeks an orientation which is independent of the official view of the regular commentators. They want a free forum for the discussion of and a free orientation in todays international and national problems.

And Rolf Kirkvaag wrote in 1956:

I travel around a lot, and I'm always struck - wherever I go in this country - by the fact that many people are opposed to our foreign policy. I hear this view so often that I can't understand why these views of the people are practically never represented by the ones who are responsible for our press. I believe we in our country have many opinions that rarely has a chance to be heard.

Orientering led directly to the creation of the Socialist People's Party, precursor to the Socialist Left, currently one of the four major parties in Norway. Their anti-American views, ignored and silenced in 1952, have, it can be safely said, prevailed, and to a large extent conquered the other media. The uniformity of the Norwegian press, though, has survived unchanged. Today it is I who am struck by how many people fall outside the limited political spectrum on display in the press, people who mock high taxes and despise bureacracy and paternalism, and who, except for two very important developments, would have rarely had a chance to be heard. Those developments are the creation of TV2 ten years ago, which opened the media for radical criticism of social democracy from the right, (and probably led directly to the success of the Progress Party), and the Internet, which - well, that's too early to say. But I'm more and more convinced that any political expansion of the Norwegian media in the near future can only happen on the Internet, (or through the creation of new media). I don't think it's a coincidence that all the active Norwegian political bloggers I know of are right-wingers in some form or another. The established press is closed to us, so like Norway's 50's socialists, we're creating our own.

I've looked at reviews of the book. It seems that it's being well received. It doesn't appear to have much to say about the period following the Cold War.

A separate issue that concerns me is journalistic integrity. Of course, we have had our own scandal over here recently. I refer to the NY Times reporter who manufactured interviews. But he violated what I think are fine standards of journalistic excellence. At least the standards are there.

It seems to me that in Norway those standards are lower or lacking. Even Aftenposten, which was once a very staid and conservative paper, now seems willing to print material that it should know is not accurate. Norwegian journalistic standards seem nearly to be tabloid standards. Aftenposten has this week used both al-Jazira and a Russian paper as sources for stories about American affairs. Are these reputable sources? It was only last week that Aftenposten reported the connection between the former Iraqi information ministry and al-Jazira. Yet Aftenposten continues to use what seems to be a discredited source (al-Jazira) when reporting on incidents that American sources will not confirm. (A helicopter downing, in this instance.) The Russian paper was used as Aftenposten's source for a report that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran. The Aftenposten headline read "U.S. Will Attack Iran". What would a Russian newspaper know about that? Today Aftenposten has adjusted the headline, so that it now reads, "Alleges that U.S. Will Attack Iran". Aftenposten adjusted the headline when someone told it that the original Russian story may have been printed by folks hostile to Putin and Putin's closer relationship to the U.S.

This is simply irresponsible journalism on Aftenposten's part. What are Norway's schools of journalism teaching its students? And what do Norwegians think about this?

Sorry, Bjørn, for all the complaints about your country. If I've got it wrong, I'd be happy to have someone set me straight.

- Gill

Gill: Great detective work. Your comments are exactly how the blogosphere should work: catching mainstream media in the act of distortion.

Gill: I think there's a difference between domestic and international reporting here. I saw that article, and it was just bad journalism - a weakly founded speculation from an unreliable source which happened to fit the writer's prejudices. But then, most all our reporting on American foreign policy has that problem.

Domestically, I think the quality is higher, though. Norwegian journalists do follow the same standards as American journalists - independence, fairness and objectivity. I don't think they're reaching those standards - and neither, of course, does Americans, objectivity is an illusion - but neither are they failing them any worse. The big problem of the Norwegian media is uniformity.

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