Storm over journalist who joined activists on the barricades
A row has erupted over the journalist who took part in the recent rioting in Copenhagen. His editor has defended and praised the hack's journalistic qualities, while some of his colleagues at Danish freesheet Nyhedsavisen are less than impressed (via Mediawatch.dk)...
After Jyllands-Posten's Peter Ernstved Rasmussen berated the journalist in question, and among other things called him a 'militant', his editor, Simon Andersen, mounted a passionate blog defence for the stone-throwing journalist (in Danish). Here's a translated excerpt:
René Fredensborg's reporting is norm breaking, innovative and unique. No other reporter in Denmark has been able to give newspaper readers such a shockingly intimate and insightful description of what goes on in the middle of the 'war zones' during the civil unrest which rocked Copenhagen in recent months. No one. While Peter Ernstved Rasmussen and his pretty colleagues have sought shelter among the police, René has crawled over walls, got glass in his eyes and paint on his clothes, he has stood side by side with the city's biggest violence psychopaths. He has looked after his job. Delivered first class journalism with a style that puts him among his generation's best writers....
However, Andersen's praise has enraged some of Fredensborg's fellow hacks, who voiced their strong disapproval in another blog post (one has to give Nyhedsavisen some credit for lively debates, even among their own rank, in the paper's blogs). A short translated excerpt :
René Fredensborg chose, not only to break the law, he chose to become a part of the story. On the activists' side. In doing so, he broke two of the most fundamental rules of journalism... We have to ask ourselves, how are the readers to take Nyhedsavisen seriously, how are they to believe in what the paper writes, when we allow a journalist who so clearly is a part of the story to cover it?
