Dagbladet is pretty damn pleased with its own coverage of the Iraq war. A recent poll gives all the major media except VG - NRK, TV2, Aftenposten and Dagbladet - insanely high approval ratings, in the 70's to 80's, for their "balanced" coverage of the war. Though it actually comes out third in the poll, "election researcher" Frank Aarebrot reinterprets the numbers, declaring Dagbladet the winner: the news media that provided the best, most balanced, and most provocative reporting on Iraq.

That's nonsense, of course, as I think I've documented in this blog. This poll measures agreement and uniformity, not balance. It is telling that the only major news media to break with the dominating neo-pacifist, anti-American line, VG, was the only one to get a relatively low "balance" rating - 43%, and a high rating on pro-American bias. Let's admit it: The Norwegian media told people what they wanted to hear, and they all told pretty much the same story.

Before this new version of the story begins to take hold - the story where the brave, independent Norwegian press wrote journalistic history with its knowledgeable, accurate, balanced and unafraid reporting of a controversial issue - let us recall some of its most glaring mistakes:

1. Almost every single prediction turned out to be false. That's quite impressive, when you think about it. One prediction turned out correct - that the US would win the war eventually - but on practically every other issue you'd have been better off with a magic eightball, or even better, reading blogs. There would, we were told, be houndreds of thousands of casualties - millions if the writer was in a good mood. The US would find itself stuck in a new Vietnam, the Arab Street explode, and massive retaliatory terrorist strikes be launched at the West. To be wrong so consistenly requires more than bad luck. You need to live in a parallell universe - and what a funny coincidence it is that almost all our journalists happened to live in the same parallell universe.

2. Failure to investigate American motives. The Norwegian media, and Dagbladet in particular, did an excellent job of covering the anti-war and anti-US movements, allowing them to explain what they believed in and why. This was important. But why weren't a similar effort made to cover the pro-war and pro-US side of the story? I have been fortunate enough to have followed the extensive American debate on Iraq, on terrorism, and on its own role in the world. I've followed that debate in magazines and weblogs. I've read intelligent views by conservatives, liberals and independents, for and against Bush, for and against war. As far as the Norwegian media was concerned, all of this may as well have not existed. A high quality debate simply didn't fit the stereotype of the flag-waving obsessive patriot, and so it wasn't reported, or when it was, only as parody placed in the mouth of those same stereotypes. Why weren't these viewpoints translated and published, or at least honestly summarized? Wouldn't it have been relevant for our understand of the war to learn how American hawks justified their support of it? Was it lack of curiosity, ideological dogmatism, or just journalistic incompetence? The fact remains that the most powerful military force in the world went to war, and the Norwegian media couldn't figure out why.

3. Failure to follow up the local angle. A major issue before the war was the possible connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Last fall, that possible connection, going by the name of Mullah Krekar, happened to land in Oslo. If that wasn't a golden opportunity to do some good investigative reporting, I don't know what is. But after the initial NRK documentary that made Krekar infamous, the Norwegian media seemingly went back into reactive mode - doing little more than passively reporting statements made by the parties involved. I can think of a dozen interesting angles a decent reporter could have followed up: What form of Islam did Krekar represent? What was the evidence of his al-Qaeda connection? How did other Kurds feel about him? Norwegian journalists mostly let foreigners do the reporting for them, when they should have talked to the Kurdish expat community in Oslo, and should have gone to Northern Iraq to uncover the truth themselves.

When they finally did go there, during the war, stories began to emerge from the (soon formerly) Ansar-controlled areas that put Krekar in a wholly different light than he had placed himself in. The Norwegian media were, it should admit, taken in by Krekar - this tall, charismatic mountain rebel with the grandfatherly smile. They allowed Krekar to shift the focus from how he had wronged Kurdistan to how the US had wronged him. Brought up on stories of the Nazi occupation, when actually put to the test themselves they failed to see through the polite facade of evil.

And this is only a summary. In Aftenposten a few days ago, Harald Stanghelle admitted that the media did make a lot of bad predictions, and he called for self-examination. That's great - too bad this insight is so rare. The first step to solving a problem is to admit that it exists. In our case, the media would appear to be suffering from a severe case of Vietnam addiction.

I've come to the conclusion that I can easily adjust for the left bias of the media but the bias towards laziness and incompetence is still a problem. For example, a fan of the New Jersey Devils hockey team could listen to an Ottawa Senators broadcast of the NHL playoffs and still follow the game despite the pro-Ottawa sentiments of the announcers. With political news, one doesn't even get a coherent explanation of the left's position on an issue.

Bjørn, your commentd about the Norwegian press is spot on. It mirrors my opinion exactly. The Norwegian media was fanatically anti-American, and the people liked that, and declared it "balanced."

Bjorn, you mentioned in one of your earlier posts that there were Norwegian journalists embedded with the U.S. military. Did their reporting change one way or another Norwegian public opinion?

Mike: Not as far as I know, but what made VG's embedded reporting so good was that it was personal, from the ground level, and not very political. One exception was the "controversial" front page that showed Iraqis welcoming the invaders with American flags - it was probably this front page that cemented their reputation as pro-US, (more than the editorials, which actually _were_ pro-American.)

Your countries news personel though had some bad pridictions, my own countries news broadcast scum are above reproach. I am in the military and have never seen in my life time a blaitant disregard to any type of protocal. Everytime you turned on CNN someone was getting fired for giving up american military positions. Now if that isnt a kick in the head I dont know what is. Reporters were like "Hey Saddam shoot your missles at these GPS cordanace and you will kill about three thousand of our troops." It got so bad that Geraldo Rivera was TOLD to leave Iraq. Heres a moron drawing in the sand positions were are tanks and personel were and broadcasting it live.

Yes, Stanghelle's admission that Norwegian editorialists got it wrong is a start. Stanghelle, though, needs to keep thinking about his own problems with objectivity in news analysis. In the editorial to which Bjørn refers, Stanghelle writes:

"Ingen bevisst journalist vil la seg misbruke. Vi ønsker å tilhøre en kritisk, og ikke en servil tradisjon. Det kan ha ført til å vi ofte ikke la stor nok vekt på vurderinger fra dem som støttet USA og Storbritannia, mens vi begjærlig grep til mer kritiske røster."

Translated: "No thinking journalist will allow himself to be misused. We wish to belong to a critical, not a servile, tradition. This may have led to our having often put too little emphasis on the opinioins of those who supported the US and Great Britain, while we eagerly listened to more critical voices."

Yes, but why does Stanghelle think that relying on those critical voices, as he did, is not also servile behavior?

Gill: Exactly. That's the logical shortcut a lot of people made. Any truly neutral reporting on Iraq would of course begin by realizing that when the US goes to war, it tells lies and withholds information, sometimes out of purely military reasons, and other times to achieve political goals, but that the same was true to a much, much larger extent for all the Arab countries.

It's difficult enough to do good reporting with this mind. To focus only on the fact that both parties might be lying, ignore the fact that one was an open, democratic society and the other a totalitarian state, and let their own anti-US bias tip the scale in American disfavor, that makes good reporting impossible.

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