Aftenposten’s article of 15 September about Document and the demand to expel Hans Rustad from the Norwegian Editors’ Association is not primarily a defence of press ethics, which is what it tries to present itself as.
It is a symptom of what it pretends to diagnose: a press that increasingly acts as a narrative-driven echo chamber, systematically omitting contradiction and relevant context that challenges the politically correct narratives, and seeking the exclusion of those who point this out.
Such things are called enforced conformity, censorship and propaganda, in other words the opposite of the freedom of expression and freedom of the press on which the editors of the narrative-driven legacy media believe they have a monopoly.
The quotations that Filter Nyheter and Aftenposten highlight as examples of Rustad spreading conspiracy theories are reproduced entirely out of context. The portrayal of their own journalism as an example of journalistically ethical, fact-based and truth-seeking journalism is repeated endlessly, entirely without objections or contradiction.
That there may be a kernel of truth in Rustad’s criticism of the enforced conformity of the Norwegian media does not appear to be a thought that can occur to them. Perhaps that is not so surprising, when we know that three out of four journalists belong to the left and hold entirely different views on important societal issues from those conveyed by Document, Norway’s leading alternative media outlet.
For years, the press and large parts of the Norwegian public sphere have treated immigration, Islam, climate, identity, the war in Ukraine and American domestic politics as issues with only one permitted conclusion and a predetermined set of forbidden critical questions. Dissenters have been stigmatised as conspiracy theorists and branded ‘far right’.
When Document and Rustad strike a chord with an audience that does not recognise itself in NRK, VG and Aftenposten, the legacy media’s response is not self-examination, but a mapping of his podcast in order to prove that he is unfit to be a colleague. When the outcry comes from an editor who attacks those in power and the established media, it is called conspiracy. When the established media shout back, it is called press ethics.
I myself write for Document and have my own alternative website. I have previously written a number of opinion pieces, including in Aftenposten. But with the increased polarisation and enforced conformity in the media in recent years, alternative voices such as mine are no longer allowed in – unless, that is, this response can become an exception to Aftenposten’s narrative-driven rule.
PS: There was no exception. Steiro Sr was fobbed off with the standard response: ‘We receive so many submissions.’
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