I've criticized the Norwegian Ministry of Culture for abusing its power over broadcasters, but at least this could not happen in Norway, (via Andrew Sullivan):

Sweden's broadcasting watchdog says it is censuring an Oprah Winfrey talk show for showing bias towards a U.S. military attack on Iraq.

The censure means Swedish television network TV4, which broadcast the show in February, must publish the decision but there are no legal or financial penalties, Annelie Ulfhielm, an official of Sweden's Broadcasting Commission, told Reuters.

"Different views were expressed, but all longer remarks gave voice to the opinion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and should be the target of attack," Sweden's Broadcasting Commission said on Wednesday.

Norway has a similar media watchdog, PFU, which is independent of the government, (run by the Norwegian Press Association), and judges news coverage according to its own code of ethics. It is mostly concerned with people who feel unfairly treated by the media, such as interview subjects who disagree with how their views were presented. There's also a broadcasting watchdog known as the Public Broadcasting Commission which evaluates overall adherance to broadcasting regulations and concession requirements, but does not judge individual breaches. The Swedish Broadcasting Commission, Granskningsnämnden för radio och TV, apperas to be a cross of the two, and one of the concession requirements national broadcasters are required to follow states that all programs - not just news and documentaries - must be politically balanced.

Here's the text of the decision:

The demand for balance means that controversial subjects may not be treated one-sided in such a way that the version and views of only one part come to dominate a program. It is allowed to describe a subject from a particular point of view. When this happens it should be made explicit in the program or the presentation of the program. The demand for balance includes all broadcasted programs, whether produced by TV4 or not.

The commission notes that the program included different opinions, but that all longer statements supported the view that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the US, and ought to be attacked. The program was therefore one-sided. This would not necessarily prevent the program from being broadcasted. But out of respect for the controversial character of the subject should, according to the commission's opinion, a reservation about the one-sidedness of the program, an attempt to put it into context, or some other balancing act, should have been given the viewer. By not doing this the commission finds that the program violates the demand of balance in the broadcasting concession.

In other words, Swedish television is not allowed to broadcast a program that presents a controversial minority view without preceding it with a warning, or following it with another program that explains why this view is wrong! I vaguely remember Germany having a similar law about not broadcasting Triumph of the Will without following/preceding it with an anti-nazi documentary. Though the implication is somewhat depressing, (Germany is full of potential nazis waiting to be swayed by Leni Riefenstahl), it is understandable. In Sweden it is not.

I also vaguely remember being criticized by a Swede a few years ago when I claimed on a webforum that Norway and Sweden should do more to protect freedom of speech. Maybe Norway should, he told me, but Sweden already has one of the world's strongest constitutional protections of speech. Perhaps they do, but it's apparently not strong enough to withstand the temptations of the limited broadcasting spectrum.

A written or unwritten law to ensure "balance" is often a step-sister of censorship, masquerading as the protector of a free and open debate supposedly under threat, while it silences controversial minority views. A non-official variant of this tactic was used in Norway during the war in Iraq, when the tabloid VG - the only newspaper to show any support of the war - ran a front page picture of Iraqis welcoming the invading troops with tiny American flags, and was criticized for having become a part of the American propaganda machine. Of course, for Swedes and Norwegians to talk about the need to protect our public sphere against American propaganda is as if the US were to talk about the need for a preemptive attack against Canada.

I'm not surprised that lazy&powerful members of the cultural elite find themselves tempted by the tactic of censoring in the name of speech. This happens wherever intellectual status becomes so disconnected from intellectual skill that people forget the basic principles of an open debate, and become used to fighting their battles with other means. What shocks me is that a government agency in a functioning European democracy would be involved in this, with the weight - approaching censorship - this puts behind the criticism.

But here's something even more curious: I can only find one mention of this ruling in the Swedish press, in the tabloid Expressen. This leaves two possibilities, that Granskningsnämnden för radio och TV is less powerful than it appears, and most Swedes treat it as a bit of a joke, or (more plausible and scandalous) that they simply don't care.

This is so sad. It proves once again that freedom of speech is NOT particularly strong in Scandinavia.

Wonder if the Swedish commission would have censured if the majority view on the Oprah Show was opposed to the Iraq war? I think not.

Reading stuff like this make me so incredibly happy that I don't live in Scandinavia any longer.

Seems a little ridiculous. After all, that was an American TV production. I would have thought that Swedes could have treated the show as a window on American opinion. A majority of Americans have supported that war, and so that show may have accurately reflected American opinion at the time. I would guess that Europeans who watch Oprah and Jerry Springer view those shows partly as peepshows on popular (or vulgar) American culture.

The problem here, I guess, is that that particular broadcast organization (TV4) must be state-owned. I don't suppose that the Swedes try to control the content of their print media, do they? Like Aftonbladet? The papers are probably privately owned. Everyone accepts that a privately owned newspaper may pursue its own political programs.

- Gill

Shocking, and absolutely crazy.

Since the radio channel NRK Alltid Nyheter (24 h news channel) sometimes broadcasts Swedish radio, I listen to it quite a lot. It is consistently, blatantly and totally anti-American. There simply exists no counter-weight to the claims that the Iraq war is morally wrong, and they hardly try to contain their glee over US setbacks. I assume that the TV is not very different.

And then, within the barrage of anti-US views, one single programme happens to give more airtime to the opposite view, and then it is censured and condemned. Astonishing!

Gill: TV4 is a commercial station, afaik Sweden's only national one, their equivalent to our TV2. But as with our national commercial broadcasters, their broadcasting concessions are granted by the state with specific requirements of their editorial profile - usually such-and-such percentage of certain programs in certain languages. And TV4's broadcasting concession explicitly states that it must be politically balanced. So the problem is not that it is state-owned, but that the state abuses its power over the broadcasting spectrum, and Sweden far more than Norway, apparently.

Gill & Johan: Freedom of the _press_ is not an issue here - we have more than enough of it in both Norway and Sweden. Newspaper herd thinking can't be explained with government control, and neither can media herd thinking in general, _usually_.

I believe that freedom of speech in Scandinavia is a function of two things: How much a medium resembles the printing press, and how much a subject has been championed by culture radicals. There's far more freedom in the press and press-like mediums like the internet than there is in constitutionally "new" media like TV and cinema. There's also far more freedom on subjects associated with the cultural liberalization of the 60's and 70's. For instance, Life of Brian was originally banned in Norway for blasphemy, (it was then marketed in Sweden as "too funny for Norway"). This could not happen today, (making fun of religion is ok), while pornography is still illegal in Norway, (objectifying women is not), and it's more illegal on TV than in print. More liberal pornography laws in Sweden and Denmark can perhaps be attributed to the fact that their radicals fought for it, and ours didn't. Racism, on the other hand, is illegal even in print.

I think this explains our various levels of free speech better than reading our constitutions will. I believe there are similar pattersn in the US, (especially TV vs print), but the libertarian tradition around your first amendment has served you well, reducing the cultural momentum required to liberalize speech standards.

Bjørn, I have the impression that there is a more fundamental kind of censorship in Norway that people there may fear. It's my impression that people there are afraid to say what they think for fear of being ridiculed by their peers. In other words, I think that small-town mentality (janteloven, some might call it) still intimidates folks who might not share the majority opinion. Sometimes, I think that Norwegians have a tendency to project this fear onto societies that are more diverse than their own. For instance, I have often heard it said by Norwegians that Americans are afraid to speak out against the war in Iraq, for fear of what their neighbors or employer might say or do. A patriotic hysteria, they say, has taken hold of the American public and stifled minority opinion there. When Norwegians say this, I think that they are thinking in terms of their own society, where I believe that there might indeed be a good deal of pressure brought to bear on folks with divergent opinions. Tell me, Bjørn, am I right? Is it true that people in Norway are afraid to express opinions that are out of step with approved (politically correct) and more widely held views? And do you believe that the pressure there to conform is perhaps greater than in other societies? I am not talking now about laws of free speech. I realize that a Norwegian is free to say what he wants to say. I am talking instead about peer pressure -- social pressure to conform. It might be this social pressure that accounts for the remarkable uniformity of opinion in the Norwegian media (when it comes to opinions of Israel and the U.S., for instance).

- Gill

Gill: No I don't think that's it. There may be some desire for conformity tied up with our social democratic tradition and our farming background, but I don't think that explains the uniformity of opinion in the media. This is more about a specific climate that has evolved among our intellectual elites - in media, politics and academia - and is best explained as a local variant of global (and American) phenomena like political correctness, only with more far-reaching effects because of our small numbers. Our public sphere is not very large, and the language barrier (which encourages the use of a limited number of interpreters to explain the outside world) makes it easy for echo-thinking to develop. And within the old media, with their higher barrier of entry, it becomes fairly easy for the echo-thinkers to preserve uniformity.

If this was a problem with Norwegian culture in general, the views expressed on the internet would be roughly the same as the views expressed in the old media. People would be afraid to stand out. But they're not. My own background is in the Norwegian mid-90's BBS community, which was full of anarchists, communists, libertarians, even nazis, _everything_ out of the ordinary, people who weren't afraid to discuss controversial issues - euthanasia, child pornography, abortion, the Holocaust - who weren't afraid to think in new ways. Same with Usenet, same with blogs. Lower the barrier of entry, open the window a bit, and uniformity becomes impossible to preserve.

OK, Bjørn -- you are obviously an example of someone whose opinions differ from those I see in the Norwegian web-based media. But answer this question for me if you can. Do you think that there are significant numbers of people out there in Norway whose opinions diverge, as yours do, from the opinions that we see expressed in Aftenposten, Dagbladet, nrk.no, etc? I'm not asking about people who agree with you. I'm just wondering whether there is a variety of opinion up there in Norway that is hidden from view -- original opinion that does not necessarily conform with what is thought to be PC in Norway. For instance, are there significant numbers of people in Norway who are still well-disposed toward the U.S.? People who, despite the war in Iraq and the use in America of capital punishment can still think straight about my country? I would like to know what Norwegians are thinking about the U.S. and Israel, but I have only the web to help me discover their thoughts. The Norwegian web-based media and Norwegian chat channels lead me to think that most Norwegians are in agreement about American and Israel, and what they think is just about all negative. Am I not getting an accurate picture of Norwegian opinion?

- Gill

Johan: "Reading stuff like this make me so incredibly happy that I don't live in Scandinavia any longer."

Me too.

There's a great article about the formation of public opinion in Norway that was published in Aftenposten in 1982 that illustrates the issue quite well:

http://home.earthlink.net/~tenkselv/hvordan_en_folkeopinion.html

(I doubt the editors of Aftenposten would publish an article with this content and of this quality these days.)

In short, it's a vicious cycle - the journalists are prone to sensationalist, reductionist versions of everything around them, convinced that they actually know what they're doing because they have jobs that require that they do, the public is influenced by what they read, and so it goes.

Thanks for the article, Leif. I have a special place in my heart for Odd Eidem. He wrote a children's book that was the very first book that I ever read in Norwegian. I sat there on the U.C.L.A. campus, that summer of 1970, and worked hard, with my Norwegian-English dictionary at my side, to read that book. The article that you point us to here appeared in 1982. I find it nostalgic -- and not only because its author led me by the hand into min fortrolighet, such as it is, with Norwegian culture. I find the article nostalgic for a couple other reasons as well. As you say, it seems unlikely that Aftenposten would publish an article like this today. I didn't often read Aftenposten when I was a young man in Norway in 1971-73. At that time, I read Dagbladet -- the paper preferred by most young people at Blindern, I'd noticed. Aftenposten, I thought at the time, was a bit stuffy and a bit too conservative for my taste. But I did think, at the time, that Aftenposten was verdig -- an honest and respectable paper. It was Norway's equivalent of the New York Times back then. And while I didn't agree with its politics, I recognized its integrity. I find it nostalgic, too, to read about the first appearances in Norway of the word "genocide" -- as used to describe Israel's treatment of the Muslim people in its part of the world. Odd Eidem argues in this article that the word, as applied to Israeli policy toward Lebanese and Palestinians, is inappropriate. And he worries that the word is taking hold not only amongst young radicals in Scandinavia, but also in government circles. I wonder what Odd Eidem thinks about Norwegian public opinion today? Now I am curious to know what my old teacher is up to these days.

- Gill

Hi Björn... Do you have any comment about NRK and why it was originally set up? I believe that most Norwegians believe what the government tells them about the reason: economy. But they never want to believe that NRK remains the mouth piece and propaganda tool of the Labor Party! What about TV2s... rather anti American position... which strikingly became apparent after the Labor Party Press media group gained a stock majority. One more thing: Do you believe that Norwegians are the richest people in the world?????? I do not believe that Norwegians know anywhing about wealth and prosperity, especially NOT about the meaning of what wealth brings to people in terms of quality. Any comment? Thanks.... Frank

Frank: NRK was set up as a monopoly in the 30's because that was the way things were done back then. Nobody thought much about commercial broadcasting of any kind until the 80's. It may have been pro-Labor at some point, but it's not a "mouth piece" or a "propaganda tool" of anyone. We don't need conspiracies to explain bias. NRK's problems are similar to BBC's problems - and you wouldn't call BBC a mouthpiece for Labor. Also, the roots of today's anti-Americanism go back to Vietnam. Again no need for conspiracy. Norwegian journalists are difficult to buy, but easy to fool.

Norway is pretty rich, and I'm not sure why you say we know nothing about wealth and prosperity. Then who does? I'm not a social democrat, but it works to a large degree. It's important to keep that in mind, even for those of us who want to reform it.

My American "First Ammendment right" was just violated by Oprah's message board yesterday as she stopped me from posting to her liberal message board.

If you want to see true discrimination...take a look for yourself. Go to Oprah's Message board and type in Oprah's search engine: "Chardonnae". I had posted approximately 150 pro-President Bush & pro-Republican messages and I was removed because I said something negative about Kerry who Oprah supports. Her double standards are appalling! She is hi'jacking American women with her one-sided mentality and anti-Presient Bush sentiments! Her "Oprah's way or no way" is a digrace to the spoon-fed woman of this country!
Woman of America need to wise up and boycott her liberal-agenda programming!

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