Why Let The Facts Ruin The Story?

A Norwegian Comments On U.S. Coverage of the Norway Terror

By Magnus Nome, cross-posted from openDemocracy

Instead of getting the facts, the US media seemed most concerned making reality fit their pre-fabricated narrative

Being in a sleepy Texas town when my home country was struck by a double terrorism attack was eerie. Following the story developing in American and Norwegian media simultaneously didn’t make the experience less bizarre.

I found the US coverage to be slow, riddled with inaccuracies and at times patronizing towards a nation still in shock. Almost an hour after Norwegian press reported that police had upgraded the death toll to over 80, CNN were reporting 17 dead. But worse: hours after it was clear that an ethnic Norwegian man was arrested, and those with local knowledge had surmised that Utøya was an unlikely target for Muslim fundamentalists in the first place, CNN and FOX still talked Jihad like it was the only show in town.

When facts about the perpetrator finally made their desks, a good disguise or a convert were immediately floated as possibilities, the willingness to jump to conclusions suddenly dampened by already having settled on one. In retrospect they’ve tried to hide behind the fact that someone on a jihadist online forum claimed responsibility. But somebody always does. Since when did we let an anonymous online forum poster, claiming to represent an organization nobody has heard of, set the agenda of all newsrooms in the world?

When indications started to emerge, suggesting another explanation, the news seemed very reluctant to even consider them. The experts on Islamist terror were already seated, they’d already done a good job justifying why Norway was in fact not such an unlikely target; soldiers in Afghanistan, planes over Libya, the early reprinting of the Danish cartoons, the effort to secure the deportation of Oslo resident extremist Mullah Krekar. So of course the Muslims would attack Norway. Except they didn’t.


Fox News didn’t let that stop them: “Islamic terrorism is a problem in Scandinavian countries”, we were told, after we knew who the actual perpetrator was, "where they're just sort of turning a blind eye to it." And indeed it seemed we were. The proof? After a UN speech where former president George W. Bush had kept to his favourite subject "the War On Terror", the Norwegian PM was the next speaker and had focused on the threat of (gasp!) Climate Change. Such naïveté.

Except Norway has never been the victim of Islamic terrorism. There have been some examples of political violence in the last decades: hate killings and bombings of a labour day parade, a mosque, immigrant corner shops and a left wing book store. Behind all these were right-wing extremists; loathed, few in number, but willing to use indiscriminate violence.

FOX were at pains to paint as irrelevant certain features of the terrorist – or "madman", as he was suddenly relegated to – his professed conservative Christianity, his extensive use of crusader imagery, his admiration for the Pope and his stated mission to protect Christian values against lefties and Muslims. While a good case can be made that his religion was not the source of his deeds, how irrelevant would his faith be had he been a Muslim? Would we hear of madmen and lone wolves then?

The news coverage over the following days taught me a lot of interesting new ‘facts’ about the innocent nation of Norway.

1. Apparently we don’t lock our doors at night. Wrong. We do.

2. There is no public debate about immigration. Wrong. Immigration generally, and Islam specifically, have been high on the agenda for more than a decade.

3. We’re all white. Wrong. Norway has become an increasingly diverse society since the early 1970s: almost a third of Oslo now has non-Norwegian origin, more than one in ten being Muslim.

4. Owning a gun is practically illegal. Wrong. Hunting and sport shooting are popular recreational activities, and Norway ranks high in gun ownership.

5. The Utøya victims were all white, and the terrorist did not kill any Muslims. Wrong. The victims reflected a diverse Norwegian society. Several of the dead were Muslims, several were of African or Middle Eastern ancestry. This information was available. It is extremely disrespectful to airbrush them out of the story to make it more coherent.

We were all horrified that so many of the victims were young, indeed most were in their teens. But the US news seemed to prefer the term ‘children’, not exactly accurate when the victims’ ages ranged from 14 to 61.

Later came the outrage, from Piers Morgan and others, that Norway has a maximum prison sentence of 21 years, as well as relatively comfortable prisons, “with flatscreen TVs”, as CNN.com gasped in horror. Never mind that he might get 30 for crimes against humanity and that the law allows for unlimited ‘containment’ for the most dangerous of criminals. Forget that the prisons referred to are low security prisons, that all TVs are flat in 2011, and that he might not get one at all.

Others lament the lack of the death penalty in Norway, calling for the blood of the killer. This is not what the victims’ families say. In a Facebook poll, 80% of Norwegians oppose death penalty for the killer. The terrorist wanted the death penalty re-instated. He will not get his way on this. We won’t let a murderer make us murderers.

Some commentators even claim that the laws against carrying weapons for self-defence are to blame. In all likelihood, all this would have meant is that one of the dead bodies would be clutching a pistol. Lecturing a country that has a murder rate about one eightth of the US one is disingenuous.

Some made a point out of the ‘naïve’ openness of Norwegian society, and one can indeed meet cabinet ministers strolling alone down the streets of Oslo. But this has nothing to do with naivety, they are all too aware of the murders of their Swedish colleagues Olof Palme (1986) and Anna Lindh (2003). Norwegian ministers refuse to let fear rule their private lives, and are willing to take this small risk as a principled stand. Nobody suggests this would be a good idea for Obama, but we insist this is how it should be in our country. It’s not naivety, it’s refusal to give up their freedom, being cordoned off from the people, just to mitigate a small risk. It's a risk they'd rather accept.

While FOX were patronizing Norway, one CNN anchor interviewed a surviving victim from Utøya. While he was probably in shock and not up to going on live TV, he did an incredible job describing how his friends were mowed down and he played dead amongst their corpses. Instead of letting the brave and articulate young man tell his story, the anchorwoman kept interrupting him to tell him how he (must surely) have felt, filling in detail in his story by guessing. She ‘understood exactly how he must feel’? I think not.

While American cable news was not very good at its job, the Hall of Shame is reserved for others. Worst of them all, former FOX employee Glenn Beck, who saw fit to compare the slaughtered youth of a democratic organisation in a free country to the compulsory, paramilitary, racist Hitlerjugend. I was horrified to learn this insane agitator has just addressed the democratic heart of Israel, Knesset. Nobody respectable should lend this man a soapbox ever again.

Journalism is not an exact science, and the flow of information in the immediate aftermath of a dramatic incident is chaotic and confused. While trying to sort false information from facts, errors will be made, and the former will be broadcast as the latter. This is what we expect and accept, as long as the uttermost effort is made to verify or falsify what is reported, if all reported information found to be false is rectified and if one mostly refrains from speculation and conjecture.

The coverage I saw did not uphold this standard. Maybe they thought accuracy wasn’t that important: their viewers didn’t know much about this country anyway, they’d accept whatever they were told.

Norway is a multicultural society. While many rural areas are almost completely white, in my Oslo school in the 80s, there were several dozen nationalities. Half my friends were Muslims, others were Christians, atheists, agnostics. Every world faith was represented on our streets, and it worked pretty well. It still does. That is not to say there aren’t problems, issues to be discussed. But that’s not because of the Labour Party, or because of Islam. That’s because it’s reality, and reality is never obvious or streamlined.

Norway's Challenge

(This article first published as Norway's Challenge on Blogcritics.)

The 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.  The response to this tragedy was typically American:  calls for vengeance against the perpetrators and political posturing by government leaders resulting in passage of draconian laws that restrict rights but do nothing to prevent future violence.

Timothy McVeigh, the man who detonated the bomb, was executed in 2001.  His accomplice, Terry Nichols, was sentenced to life.  As a direct result of the bombing, Congress overwhelmingly passed and then-President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which amended the federal habeas corpus statute to place onerous provisions on criminal defendants and greatly circumscribe their ability to obtain relief in federal court. 

The United States is the only western country that still uses the death penalty, and last year together with China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen, carried out the most executions.  With over two million people in prison, we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.  Attempts to explore the root causes of crime are dismissed as bleeding-heart approaches, and resources for drug rehabilitation, mental health services and vocational training are severely limited.   

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's initial response to the twin attacks that left 76 people dead was to de-politicize the tragedy and call for more democracy, more tolerance, and help for the survivors and victims' families:  "We meet terror and violence with more democracy and will continue to fight against intolerance," he said.  In response, tens of thousands of Norwegians lay thousands of flowers around the capital.

Norway's criminal justice system couldn't be more different than ours. There is no death penalty and no life sentences.  The focus is on rehabilitation not retribution.  Hedda Giertsen, a professor in criminology at the University of Oslo, explains that they put a lot of resources into this:  "The idea is for people to be able to leave prison and lead a life free from crime. There is help to find accommodation, help with personal finances, education - nearly half of Norway's prison population is offered some sort of course or education."

Anders Breivik has been charged with acts of terrorism, which carry a maximum sentence of 30 years.  While this relatively lenient sentence for such horrific acts has been met in the U.S. with disdain and disbelief, Norwegians, by and large, are not demanding harsher laws or any change in their country's approach to criminal justice.  The BBC reports that while many wish that Breivik would spend his life in prison, "there have been few calls for adapting Norway's criminal justice system to make it easier to sentence someone to life in prison in cases of extreme terror."  Typical was Geir Ruud, the Norwegian editor of a Danish newspaper, who was quoted in the Daily Beast:  “Even if a lot of people think 21 years is too little, in Scandinavian countries it’s deeply ingrained that criminals should have a second chance in society.  These are the values all those kids who were killed believed in, and the values Breivik fought against. If we let his crime change our societies, then he will have won."

And it works.  Norway has a 20 percent recidivism rate for convicts who serve time in prison, compared to nearly 60 percent in America. Their incarceration rate is less than a tenth of ours.  The murder rate in Norway is one of the lowest in the world, 0.6 intentional murders per 100,000, compared to 5 per 100,000 in the U.S. 

It isn't Norway that needs to re-think their criminal justice system, it is us.

Norway's Tragedy: Contexts and Consequences

By Thomas Hylland Eriksen, July 24, 2011, cross-posted from open Democracy.
 

The atrocities inflicted on Norwegian society by a far-right activist leave the country shocked and in mourning. They will have lasting effects even if their exact character is hard to foreseen. 

By coincidence, I was in Oslo on Friday 22 July 2011. During this time of the year, the main holiday season in Norway, the cities tend to be empty and quiet. My teenage son was due to participate in a soccer tournament in Denmark, and I was there to accompany him to the boat before returning to our summer house on the south coast.

In the afternoon, as I was working in the garden and my son was practicing with his football, we heard a loud crash, as if lightning had struck. Dark clouds began to loom nearby. We didn't think any more about it. Only half an hour later, however, I was rung up by a friend who asked me to turn on my computer. From then onwards, events took an increasingly dramatic turn as the afternoon gave way to evening, evening to night, and gradually the full extent of the atrocities became known.

When the domestic media began to report on the blast in central Oslo, virtually everybody must have thought of extreme Islamic groups. At least one, unknown group which called itself "friends of global jihad", appeared to have taken responsibility for the attack on the web. Some experts said that the attack carried the “fingerprints” of al-Qaida. But when the first reports came of the shootings at Utøya - my son and I were in the car by then, on our way to the boat - the connection with international terrorism, Islamic or not, started to seem less likely.

Utøya, a tiny island on a picturesque lake about forty minutes' drive from Oslo, has for decades been the summer camp site of the youth wing of the Labour Party. To target this camp, a gathering of several hundred politically engaged youths from their early teens to their mid-20s, suggested a connection with domestic politics rather than a link to Norway's participation in the wars in Libya or Afghanistan.

The perpetrator was finally apprehended towards the end of what was already being described as the most tragic day in Norwegian history since the second world war. The attack on government buildings in central Oslo, which led the New York Times correspondent to describe “the usually placid” capital of Norway as a place resembling a war-zone, was suddenly a lesser concern; although physical destruction and human suffering, including the loss of at least seven lives, were very considerable. The massacre of youths trapped on Utøya, still difficult to fathom, was simply beyond belief.

The death-toll from Utøya, over ninety at the time of writing, is likely to increase in the coming days. The police investigation and interrogation of the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, will continue in order to understand the context of this catastrophe. We are still in a collective state of shock and disbelief, yet it is necessary, even now, to take a step back and begin to reflect on the consequences of this tragedy for Norwegian society. I can think of three.


The contours of change

Before the shootings at Utøya were reported, commentators on national radio and TV spoke about political violence and terrorism, drawing parallels with the attacks on Nairobi, London, and Madrid (and, of course, New York and Washington). As it later became clear that the acts were committed by one man (possibly with an accomplice), a comparison with the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma and Timothy McVeigh appeared more pertinent. This is relevant for the political interpretation of the tragedy, since it must be understood in domestic terms.

The first consequence and the main message to Norwegian society is thus that citizens can never again be or feel entirely safe.

Psychologically, it may even be more difficult to live with the memories of the horrors in the knowledge that the perpetrator could have been a neighbour rather than a foreign fanatic. The mass murderer is after all a good-looking young man from the plush western suburbs of Oslo, with no diacritica singling him out as dangerous, but clearly fuelled by immense hatred of the spineless, politically-correct elite who had sold out the country to foreign invaders.

In this sense it feels more like a natural disaster than a terrorist attack: a kind of tragedy against which one cannot fully protect oneself. A registered farmer, Mr Breivik could easily purchase chemical fertiliser; and both police uniforms and firearms can be obtained on the black market. It is impossible to rule out the possibility that something similar might happen in the future, and no act of prevention would be sufficient. This is why the catastrophe feels more like a tsunami than anything else.

Second, the fact that Mr Breivik was associated with right-wing, anti-Islamic currents in Norwegian society ought to lead to consequences. The recent years have seen a proliferation of hate-speech against immigrants, and Muslims in particular, on certain websites; some defenders of cultural diversity (myself included) are routinely attacked in vaguely threatening ways for betraying Norwegian culture and western values by taking an inclusive and liberal stance towards minorities and immigration.

Mr Breivik was an active contributor to at least one such website, www.document.no, which is itself strongly influenced by the so-called “Eurabia” literature - the cluster of publications based on the assumption that Islam is incompatible with western values, which and sometimes also intimates that Muslims are plotting to achieve political dominance in western Europe. Persons who hold such views have until now been treated respectfully by the establishment media, and have often been given ample space to present their views. There have been attempts to rehabilitate racist pseudo-science (also publicised by leading media); and it is common to see (especially on the web) crude generalisations about Muslims, as well as aggressive denunciations of politicians and other defenders of the new Norway.

Norway has changed rapidly in terms of population. Immigration to the country has grown fast, and some tensions are bound to result from this.

Persons with a minority background (first or second generation) now make up about 10% of the population, slightly over half of non-European origin. However, in order to prevent refugees, family members of immigrants settled in the country and labour migrants from central and eastern Europe from coming to Norway, this society would have to change almost beyond recognition. Norway is a liberal, open society which is integrated with the outside world in a million ways, from cheap Chinese imports and Hollywood films to studies abroad and oil exports.

Immigration policies in Norway are not unusually liberal compared with other western European countries; but the wealth and stability of this oil-rich country have made it something of an immigrant magnet in recent years. This is why it would be inaccurate to speak of Mr Breivik and his co-believers as cultural conservatives. Cultural reactionaries would be more precise; they envision a society which no longer exists.

Third, the domestic political scene will be affected by the events, although it is too early to tell in which direction and for how long. The Labour Party will probably receive a number of sympathy votes. The right-wing Progress Party, with which Mr Breivik had been associated in the past, may suffer a setback.

The tragedy in Oslo and at Utøya was not a dramatic version of the well-rehearsed story of the “clash of civilisations”: the west versus Islam. The attacks were in the event the polar opposite of the terrorist acts in Madrid (2004) or London (2005). Yet there are similarities. Norway has, as some observers say, lost its innocence. The trusting, secure, easygoing society to which we have been accustomed, is under threat.

Parts of it may revive and and even in some ways emerge strengthened out of this tragedy. But whether aware of it or not, we doubtless woke on Saturday morning to a slightly more paranoid, slightly less pleasant society. A society where we have become aware of our fundamental vulnerability.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo.   openDemocracy is a British website that publishes high quality news analysis, debates and blogs about international politics and culture