Agitpropperne DanMarx Radio og Norsk RiksKringkastning har begge deres mas med at forhindre sandheden i at slippe ud af flasken…
Bruce Bawer bor det meste af tiden i Norge, men som amerikaner har han et skarpt øje for humbug. Om den norske udgave af DanMarx Radio, NRK, skriver han i Frontpagemag.com:
“Well, it’s done. I just made the first of my two compulsory yearly payments to NRK – short for Norsk rikskringkasting. In English it calls itself the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, but believe me, there’s nothing remotely corporation-like about it. It’s a fully government-owned and government-operated outfit, and its fealty to the Labor Party worldview is reflected in the nickname by which some of its disgruntled viewers refer to it: ARK, or Arbeiderpartiets rikskringkasting – Labor Party Broadcasting.
As of 2013, the semiannual NRK license fee – which, I should perhaps underscore, is something you pay in addition to whatever you might happen to shell out for your cable and/or satellite service – went up to $240.33, for a total of $480.66 per year. (Out of the kindness of their hearts, they divide the amount in two, apparently realizing that for a lot of people this is no small expense.) It’s a tax, of course, but it’s not treated as a tax – which is reflected in the fact that the fee actually includes an eight percent value-added tax. In other words, not only do they charge you a tax on top of your regular income tax to pay for a product that you may never even use – they also tax the tax.
With NRK, as with the BBC, it’s the license fees that pay the bills and keep the enterprise going. And as I’ve complained before (and will complain again), what you’re doing when you cough up this sum is paying to be propagandized. Essentially, that’s what NRK is: a propaganda operation, designed to ensure that when the Norwegian people get their news about the world, it’ll be served up to them with just the right spin, in hopes that it’ll keep them from straying too far from the socialist line they were fed in school. To be sure, ever since 1992, when NRK was finally forced to surrender its TV and radio monopoly, there have been other broadcast news sources in Norway; but old habits are hard to break, and besides, Norwegians have been told all their lives that NRK is the only really serious and truly reliable news source, since, unlike commercial TV channels, which always must look over their shoulders at their advertisers, NRK is undefiled by poisonous capitalistic influences, and is thus able to present them with the pure and unadulterated truth. An amazing number of people actually buy this bull. Dagsrevyen, the national news program that is broadcast every evening at seven, regularly draws around a million viewers in this country of five million.
Still, every once in a while NRK tries to pull something so flagrant in its dishonesty that it actually erupts into something of a scandal. Case in point: the January 12 edition of Dagsrevyen featured an eight-minute story about Mirela Mustata, a Romanian gypsy, or Romani, woman who was in a Norwegian prison after having been convicted of “aggravated human trafficking” in a case involving four children. The clear objective of NRK’s report was to paint Mustata as a victim of cultural prejudice, punished simply for trying to keep her children from starving. To this end, NRK implied that Mustata had done nothing more than put her kids to work selling costume jewelry on the street – which, viewers were instructed, is a harmless, generations-old gypsy tradition. “I did everything I could to take care of my children,” a weeping Mustata said on camera.
(mere…)