True Lies - Norwegian media vs a Norwegian blogger
I have in the past pointed out errors and bias in the Norwegian press, as has other bloggers. Sometimes I have written emails to the journalist to point out obvious errors of fact, and mostly received polite replies. Sometimes corrections have been made.
Yesterday I posted an article fisking the Associated Press and Austrian historians for misrepresenting Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech to the republican convention. Afterwards, I discovered that journalist David Stenerud in TV Nettavisen had written a Norwegian article based on the same AP article as posted on CNN. As is customary in the Norwegian press, the presentation was dumbed down and sensationalized, and the distinction between journalistic reporting and opinion disappeared completely. Here is my translation of the entire TV2 Nettavisen article.
Historians: Arnie made a fool of himself
The speech in support of Bush was so full of factual errors that historians want to send Arnold Schwarzenegger back to school. Check the Terminator's howlers.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is being asked to return to school after his fiery speech in support of president George W. Bush during the Republican party convention in New York earlier this week.
It is historians from Schwarzenegger's native land Austria who encourages him to do this, after the earlier muscle actor made a number of factual howlers in his speech.
Schwarzenegger said among other things that Austria became a socialist country after the second world war, and that he himself had witnessed Soviet tanks in the streets.
Wasn't even born
But when Schwarzenegger emigrated to the USA in 1968, Austria had a conservative coalition government and didn't have a single socialist regional kansler, according to Ananova.
Martin Polaschek with the Karl Franzen-university accuses the governor of California of "trying to use the old communist threat in Bush' campaign."
Another historian, Stefan Karner, adds:
- The fact is that as a child [in] Styria impossibly could have seen Soviet tanks, since the British had taken over the control of the province when Schwarzenegger was born in 1947.
(The last paragraph was a mess in the Norwegian original, too)
This Norwegian article is built on the same misreading of (or ignorance about) Arnold Schwarzenegger's actual words to the convention, and the naive assumption that only political parties calling themselves socialist have socialist policies. As I pointed out below, Schwarzenegger explicitly stated in his speech that he did not live in a Soviet controlled sector, but that he and his family sometimes travelled into it, once in his uncle's car. Thus the whole argument and ridicule from the Austrian historians fall away, and can be safely attributed to lousy source checking and a wounded national pride.
I sent an email to journalist David Stenerud pointing to my posting and saying that the claims in his article was not really true. After all, it is not difficult to understand the issues. Neither is it really debatable whether the AP wire and the articles based on them are factually wrong. They are.
Stenerud had obviously left for the day, and I received an email back from Ole Valaker, obviously the journalist on night duty. He is a journalist who like his collegue has specialised in "weird" news (that is, translating Ananova articles) in his own journalistic career. He has also been a proponent for posting tit pictures, at least if we are to believe an article in Norwegian about how tits get clicks on Norwegian newspaper websites. Everybody must have some talent.
Valaker's response was curt, impolite and stupid. Being an arrogant asshole has its uses, sure, but it helps having a clue first. Ignoring the fact that the article made a point of Schwarzenegger not having seen Soviet tanks because he did not live in the Soviet sector, he went into a polemic about how unlikely it is for a young boy to join his family on a drive to another part of the country. In fact, the mere idea of such a trip was "laughable." I am obviously an anomaly, then, who travelled to Northern Norway and Spain in my family's car at around the same age (thanks to the US and other allies, I didn't see any Soviet tanks). Obviously Valaker was ignorant about the fact that Austria is a quite small country (84K sq km ~ 32.4K sq mi) , far smaller than Norway and roughly the size of Maine in the USA. The Schwarzenegger family hardly had to drive for weeks to get to the Soviet sector; in fact his spokeswoman Margita Thompson says he lived as close as 30 miles to it, barely an hour's drive.
Totally unaffected by a factual rebuttal, journalist Ole Valaker started digging for further arguments. In between his detailed studies of the effect of tits on website click rates, he apparently had time to investigate the social conditions of post-WWII Austria and the psychology of its inhabitants. Arnold's father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, was a member of the nazi party and a police officer in the tiny village of Thal during the war. A former nazi member would surely not enter the Soviet sector, Valaker mused. Apparently, in occupied Austria all the low ranking members of the NSDAP hid in a basement for ten years, and would never visit relatives or friends or seek business opportunities in the Soviet sector.
The problem for Valaker, the AP and the countless news sources who ran this story mocking Schwarzenegger's memories, is that to claim that somebody is a liar and that he did not witness what he personally says he did, you need some good evidence. And speculation about the conditions, personal circumstances and psychological profiles of the involved simply doesn't qualify as "evidence" under any serious definition of that word.
It is worth noting, notwithstanding Valaker's claim that the story is "rock solid", the Associated Press did issue a revised version of the article. It allowed room for a rebuttal of the "tanks" claim, it explained why Schwarzenegger called Austria a "socialist" country, while allowing the original charges to stand. It also toned down the original article and changed the emphasis of the "Soviet tanks" criticism (the CNN article I originally quoted has thus changed). "Rock solid"? I don't think so.
The world press is still running wild with the original charge, with various mocking headlines (Around 207 English language versions of the AP article at last count). Schwarzenegger is just too easy a target for them. He is a supporter for Bush, widely detested by the left-leaning media, he is a superstar, and he has big muscles which makes him an easy target for ridicule implying he is stupid and ignorant. Obviously, his record of massive success in at least three different arenas does not detract from this image in their eyes.
It also helps this dishonest story that most journalists are not very strong on fact checking, and very stubborn about refusing to admit errors even when contrary facts stare them in the face.
PS: PrestoPundit has more debunking and commentary!
Update: Spartacus has more!
4:56:43 PM 
|
