[lit-ideas] The European Press

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:33:41 -0800
[from Bawer's While Europe Slept, page 40] "Why did Oslo cops back off from
dealing with immigrants?  Why had people in Amsterdam been so unwilling to
discuss seriously anything having to do with immigrants?  And why did the
papers and TV news hardly ever contain so much as a hint of the truth about
any of this?  The longer I lived in Europe, the clearer it became that the
answer lay in the ironclad multiculturalism that ruled the minds of the
political, media, and academic establishment.  To be sure, it took me a
while to gather that there was such an establishment - and that it exercised
immense control over the news and opinions to which the public was (and
wasn't) exposed.  . . ."

 

[Page 46]  "In 2004, I followed the Sudan crisis for weeks online before
seeing any mention of it in the Norwegian media.  The same was true of the
UN Oil-for-Food Program scandal: I'd read plenty online that made Secretary
General Kofi Annan look very bad indeed, but for weeks the only mention of
it in the Norwegian media was in a brief notice in Aftenposten.  Then, in
the summer of 2004 (thanks to a mischievous temporary editor who was
obviously out to stir things up), I actually managed to publish an op-ed in
Dagbadet about anti-Americanism, in which I noted that the Norwegian media,
while obsessing over Abu Ghraib (since it made the United States look bad),
had totally buried the Oil-for-Food story (since it made the UN look bad).
Lo and behold, a couple of days later Dagbladet ran a full-page story on
Oil-for-Food - which did a splendid job of leaving the impression that it
was the United States, not the UN, whose hands were dirty in this matter."

 

[Page 47] "You have to be a regular media consumer in Western Europe for a
while in order to understand just how dramatic the transatlantic difference
can be.  The European media can be stunning in the relentlessness and lack
of nuance (that attribute supposedly revered in Europe) with which they
disparage America and Israel, idealize the UN and EU, and sanitize
fundamentalist Islam.  Norway is probably more or less representative: a
2003 poll showed that no fewer than 69 percent of Norwegian journalists
identified themselves as socialists, compared with 43 percent of the general
population; the 'populist' Progress Party, the only major party that
represents a serious challenge to the establishment philosophy, was
supported by 22.5 percent of Norwegians but only 3 percent of journalists -
and that 3 percent, I would wager, were more likely to be writing about
local theater or school sports for regional weeklies than commenting on
international affairs in Oslo-based dailies.*

 

"* In Norway, at least, one reason for the lack of political diversity among
journalists is that most of them are graduates of the journalism college at
Volda, where the faculty consists largely of former members of the Maoist,
pro-Khmer Rouge AKP (Workers' Communist Party).  Norway's only professor of
journalism at the university level, Sigurd Allern of the University of Oslo,
was himself once head of the AKP."

 

Lawrence
[lit-ideas] The European Press

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