In Norway, you are free to say exactly what you want, if you agree with the authorities

Norwegian media enjoy the best press freedom in the world. This appears in the press freedom index from Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Norwegian media have basked in the glory of the appointment, as one would expect. Now it is not so strange that the Norwegian media enjoys so much freedom since 99% of them think exactly the same as the authorities about corona, the defense budget, corona, digital surveillance or whatever it may be.

The RFS report can be found here:

2024 World Press Freedom Index – journalism under political pressure

The report states, among other things:

Many governments have stepped up their control over social media and the Internet, restricting access, blocking accounts and suppressing news and information messages.

But it does not mention that the USA is the country that has done the most to control both the sharing of opinions and analyses, as well as censorship and blocking in social media.

But right must be right: RSF mentions that the USA has fallen ten places in the ranking.

Now, RSF is not completely unscathed either.

Their annual report shows who finances them, and it looks like this:

The European Commission, the foreign ministries of France, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan and the United Kingdom, the Ford Foundation, Luminate, the National Endowment for Democracy (CIA), the Open Society Foundations (Soros). A whole bunch of regime changers. And of course Free Word.

PSF has an annual turnover of 6,166,135 euros (2019). Of this, 515,390 euros are donations.

I promised to give you Hell

Editor-in-chief Pål Steigan gave an introduction to the Hell Conference on 11 February 2023.

There he summarized the criticism of Norwegian media and journalists as follows:

• You closed your eyes and looked the other way when the CIA staged a coup d’état against the legally elected president of Ukraine in close cooperation with Hitler-type Nazis. If the press had done its job at the time, we might have avoided the world war we are now unfortunately in.
• You shut up and let your keyboard rest when the Nazis in Ukraine massacred and burned to death Russian activists in the House of Trade Unions in Odessa and committed pogroms elsewhere.
• You have almost totally failed to reveal that many years ago Ukraine turned genocidals and Nazi collaborators into national heroes and their ideology into state ideology. You are not alone here. If it’s any consolation, Bernt Hagtvet and the HL center on Bygdøy have also kept their mouths shut about this.
• The Norwegian media and the majority of Norwegian foreign journalists have been silent and lied about how the Gulf states, the USA and NATO have used jihadists to destroy Syrian society and cause enormous suffering to ordinary Syrians. The war has been going on for almost twelve years and the Norwegian media who have taken the trouble to visit Syria can be counted on one hand.
• You have been largely silent about the terrible genocide in Yemen, and especially about our allies’ responsibility for it.
• You have failed to dig into what happened when international financial capital decided to dump the biggest financial crisis in history onto the world’s populationf so that they themselves would become richer than ever.
• When Director of Health Guldvog de facto declared emergency measures in the form of an unprecedented closure of Norway, broke the Constitution on many points, set aside the rule of law and introduced the infection control state, you did not ask a single critical question.
• You enthusiastically supported the closure of society, the so-called lockdown, which caused Norwegian society hundreds of billions in losses. In the same way, you supported the orders to close schools and to introduce mandatory masks. This despite the fact that no respiratory virus in history has been stopped with lockdown, school closures and face masks.
• Now that Elon Musk has opened the Twitter files, we know that the CIA, FBI and the Biden administration ordered the tech giants and social media to censor, remove and discredit some of the world’s foremost specialists in immunology. You allowed it to happen and helped to whip up a fear in society for which there was no basis. The media played an absolutely central role in the fear campaign. Without you, it would never have gotten as bad as it did.
• Norwegian media’s CV through the corona crisis is a single long and shameful betrayal of everything called a free, independent and critical press. You should set up the journalists’ own corona commission to investigate this tragedy.
• Just think of how you sat as lit candles and in all seriousness published the prime minister’s absurd order about how many people you were allowed to invite to the Christmas party or the health minister’s promise that we will soon be allowed to hug each other again. It was pure madness – you should have made a comedy show.
• When the gas pipeline to Germany in which Russia had invested 15 billion euros was blown up, most of you managed to write that “Putin had done it”, even though the US president had promised to stop this pipeline.
• Now the greatest living journalist, the man who exposed My Lai, Abu Ghraib and the secret weapons shipments to the jihadists in Syria, Seymour Hersh, has revealed that it was the US and Norway that were behind it. None of us can beat that man to the knees when it comes to investigative journalism.
• And what does the Norwegian press do? You are doing the only thing you can: you are attacking Hersh as a person and trying to make people forget about his documentation.
• We are now de facto in the Third World War. It won’t take much before it becomes a nuclear war that can wipe out humanity and civilization as we know it.
• And what does the press do? You are inciting war, demonizing Russians and Putin in a way we have hardly seen since the ferocious war campaign in England before the First World War.
• Many of you have made yourselves tools of the military-industrial complex and are thus complicit.

But I promised you a way to salvation. And it is simple.

• Stop being microphone stands for power.
• The more power people have, the more critical you should be.
• Follow the money to see who profits from this misery.
• Have as much ceiling height as possible. Invite opposing views to challenge each other.
• In short: become journalists again. Fulfill Be careful with the poster’s words and letters.

You will find it liberating and satisfying.

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PS: A funny apropos

A report that illustrates the point in our headline is NRK’s ​​coverage of a statement from the leader of Rød Ungdom, Amrit Kaur. Main story on the state channel on May 4 in the morning:

Destructive for Red

The leader of Rødt’s youth party believes the country’s prime minister is a terrorist. The Red leader can only demand an apology.

Statskanalen instructs Rødt on how to meet the statement from the head of the youth organisation. Should the Rødt leader not be happy, which she has of course always done, she could have expected a “media storm”.

Freedom of expression only goes so far.