The assault on Document is reminiscent of the cartoon controversy. Back then, Jonas Gahr Støre bent the knee to Islam, while the Danes held out for a few more years.
We are in the process of turning the clock back, to before the Enlightenment. Today it is Trump who is a gigantic caricature that the Norwegian media have built up over the course of ten years. They hate him intensely, and at the same time it is as though every expression of hatred is a sacrificial offering to an evil god.
If one cuts oneself off from rational assessment, from gathering material from different sources, one’s view of reality will over time lose its relevance. For the Norwegian media, no American media exist to the right of the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, despite the fact that these have moved far to the left.
When I choose to have this article accompanied by an image from India, it is because it illustrates the imagination and playfulness of Hindu culture, in contrast to the black figure of Pesta in pictures by Theodor Kittelsen.
Freedom of expression and freedom of the press are what are supposed to defend us. Now it is the press itself that appears to think it is its task to purge its own ranks.
Morgenbladet today carries an article advocating that Document be expelled from the Norwegian Editors’ Association (Norsk Redaktørforening). Journalist Ingeborg Misje Bergem has taken inspiration from Filter Nyheter’s coverage of Skogpodden and accepts it at face value. Not a single critical question. How does an editorial office have the capacity to review hundreds of hours of audio recordings and collate themes and classify them?
The answer is that, of course, no editorial office has time for that, but there is AI, and hey presto, anything is possible. Bergem does not even mention the problematic aspect of AI now being used to target political opponents. She addresses the Norwegian Editors’ Association. Should she not instead have problematised the difficulties a supervisory authority will encounter if it receives complaints based on mass processing using AI? Everyone understands that this raises a host of issues. But not if one is woke.
Then the phenomenon and the word coincide. There is no need to dig. Meaning is self-evident.
Such is the state of all Norwegian media that have even a strip of woke hide.
After 22 July, commentators such as Øyvind Strømmen and Lars Gule could gorge themselves on phrases such as ‘the pitch-dark and paranoid nature of Rustad’s and Document’s worldview’. Now they are returning in full force.
Misje Bergem does not doubt for a moment that Filter Nyheter’s presentation is correct. She cannot imagine that the words mean something entirely different to the at least 4,000 people who listen to Skogpodden every day.
That another world is possible. The 77 million Americans who voted for Trump do not exist, compared with the goodness of a few hundred thousand Norwegians who are convinced that they are right about most things, and particularly about what is happening in the United States, in the Americans’ own country. Norwegians know best!
It helps, of course, that NOK 35 million from the state is in the pot for Morgenbladet, and NOK 45 million for Klassekampen.
The purging of the Norwegian press elevates this into a crusade that requires no documentation.
Misje Bergem uses the same argument that appeared in VG’s podcast: Can other media outlets countenance having Document as a member?
The Norwegian media have swallowed the conspiracy talk of the Democrats in the United States hook, line and sinker. First they deny it any relevance, before turning around and saying that they are offended, that hearing such claims demonstrates a lack of respect.
Does the parade of conspiracy theories published on Document’s platforms – among them those concerning Norwegian, editor-controlled media – contribute to ‘creating respect for the media’s system of self-regulation and integrity’?
This notion that other people’s opinions constitute an insult and an offence is strongly reminiscent of how Muslims reacted to the cartoons in 2005–06. They were personally offended that anyone could hold an opinion about their faith and conduct.
Empirical evidence was thereby rendered irrelevant. Historical knowledge about Islam’s treatment of people of other faiths, heretics and dissidents did not help. Støre accepted the Muslims’ sense of offence at the time, and it should come as no surprise that he is prime minister when the media now want to engage in self-purification. They are Støre’s children.
Støre’s world cannot live with having a media outlet such as Document operating in their midst.
The Norwegian media have systematically created an enemy image of Trump and sided with his enemies. Nothing that speaks in his favour appears in the Norwegian media. It is single-source journalism. Yet these media outlets, such as Morgenbladet, have the audacity to say that we have presented no documentation.
What we write is ‘systematic – and without any documentation’.
Media outlets that do not spend time on American media, but listen to Tove Bjørgaas and Eirik Løkke, know better what is going on?
Convinced of one’s own excellence, one can say:
This is not a question of political opinions in themselves, but of what working methods, what integrity and what means one can expect from editor-controlled media.
Integrity? If one defines the ‘evidence’ oneself, it becomes a meaningless criterion.
Everything is becoming tautological: self-confirming. One tolerates only that which confirms one’s own world.
That is why it is entirely logical that editor Bore of Vårt Land advocates closing comment sections, in the name of democracy!
There is only one method for journalists such as Misje Bergem: woke. For them, equity means something entirely different from what it means to us. The difference is that I know what Misje Bergem means by the word, but she is cognitively incapable of understanding my view.
Instead, she points to the door and says: OUT!
Holy in her conviction that she is right.
There is an element of kicking the deplorables here as well:
‘No one can prevent Hans Rustad from wandering around the woods while broadcasting the wildest conspiracy theories and gross, undocumented claims to a paying audience. But as long as he does so with the seal of approval of the Norwegian Editors’ Association, the association undermines the entire understanding of the standards that editor-controlled media set for themselves.’
Here the principle of purity is introduced into the Norwegian press. This is religious. If one accepts this way of thinking, there is one party that holds the power to define.
