Journalists have always thought highly of themselves. With great conviction they will claim that they always pursue the truth, that they defend the weak against the powerful and bravely hold power to account. That is why those in charge fear them. That is why they demand unfettered access to Gaza so they can expose Israel’s alleged genocide, mass murder and famine (which, of course, they dare not do), and why they demand protection for the brave “Hamas-journalists” who from time to time lose their lives. Many Swedes and Norwegians have signed up to this posture, and 300 Danes as well — most of them, apparently, some sort of journalists — and thirty of them even employed by Danmarks Radio: reporters, studio hosts, editorial secretaries, communications-planning-and-dissemination consultants and so on and so forth. Including Puk Damsgaard, who is arguably DR’s chief female Middle East mascot.
I know their psychology. I know the lice in the corridor. They feel like courageous, anti-authoritarian rebels who have run the gauntlet and just captured a bastion inside a stodgy, conservative apparatus. Hence their arrogance, their audacity and their eagerness to sign up to that grotesquely mendacious text.
But they do not realise that they are not rebellious insurrectionists from the early 1970s. On the contrary, they already hold power, because the DR apparatus was taken over long ago by other left-leaning forces who merely kicked in open doors — only two generations ago.
One example of DR’s condition: that a STASI-approved and GDR-paid journalist like John Wilken could finish his high-paid, plush-pension career at Danmarks Radio — even as the journalists’ shop steward — in the 1990s, after years of paid propaganda for the Soviet dictators’ lackeys in East Germany in the 1960s (Radio Berlin International) and later playing “DDR correspondent” (Mit Berlin vindue) for the treasonable rag Land og Folk (paid by the GDR), tells you a great deal about DR’s state over the past 30–40 years.
As usual, the tempest was stoked when Bent Blüdnikow attacked DR’s journalists. Half of the bold signatories then had cold feet and found hairs in the soup — like the presenter Maria Dohn, who allegedly didn’t realise she had signed a statement declaring Israel already guilty of genocide. The new boss Bjarne Corydon brushed the matter aside, saying the journalists apparently hadn’t understood the text — which of course revealed his low expectations of their intellectual capacities.
But it is not that innocent.
It is not innocent that the four-billion-kroner palace has been infiltrated by Palestine-lovers who equate the war in Gaza with the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda; who equate Netanyahu with Hamas; who claim that Israel intends to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip of Palestinians; who assert that Israel is deliberately bombing and starving children to death.
I could go on, but instead I warmly recommend Dan Harder’s Israel Online Media Watch Danmarks Radio, which catalogues DR journalists’ mixture of Israel-hatred and sheer stupidity since 7 October; it is a catalogue of sins that makes me dream of mass dismissals and Berufsverbot.
But the remedy must be fundamental, for all that left-wing brainwashing begins in primary school, continues through high school and culminates at university, in the public sector and in the media.
The journalistic distortion is not a particularly Danish phenomenon — it is global. In April 2002 I spent several days trapped in Bethlehem in the unbearable company of some American Palestine activists and journalists, because the Israelis had moved in with tanks and were beating the Palestinians. Joshua Hammer of Newsweek was so impressed by what we witnessed that he rushed to write a book: A Season in Bethlehem: The Siege of the Church of the Nativity, launched with the claim: “A perceptive account of chaos and violence, in which Hammer lets the warring parties speak for themselves.” One evening I asked him whether he found it significant that Palestinians, when making their case, always used the term “yahud” (Jews), which his Palestinian interpreter consistently translated as “Zionists” (sahayuni — a word they never actually used). That detail did not interest him.
I write with melancholy awareness that I speak into an echo chamber, and the task of cleaning up and clearing out the media is so vast and hopeless that I am tempted to write to Netanyahu and tell him that if Hamas does not hand over the last bones of the murdered abductees, he may as well pave over the remaining 47 percent of Gaza — it would make no difference to Danmarks Radio’s coverage anyway. But he has probably figured that out long ago, otherwise he would not have achieved such impressive results.
