Norwegian bloggers and the cartoon wars
While lunching with an old friend of mine in Pimlico, London, the other week, he expressed curiosity about how Norwegian bloggers dealt with the infamous cartoon wars. Here’s a peak at the most recent developments:
“If the threats against the president of the Norwegian journalists union, Per E. Kokkvold, had become more serious, more of the country’s newspapers would have published the Mohammed cartoons to spread the risk of repercussions,” the general secretary of the Norwegian Editors Society, Nils E. Øy, told the audience at a debate in the press club in Oslo Wednesday.
As it was, only the editor of an obscure Christian magazine published the cartoons, and was forced to go undercover with 24/7 police protection. “It’s incredible how far the media is prepared to go to protect one of their own,” Vampus, Norway’s best blogger according to a poll in one of Norway’s biggest tabloids and an ardent campaigner for free speech, commented dryly.
If mainstream media abstained from publishing the cartoon that depicted Mohammed as suicide bomber, a lot of Norwegian bloggers certainly did. The most prominent was Vampus. Unfortunately Vampus writes in Norwegian, but here are two in English: Ghost of Goldwater and Instant Opinion.
