NRK had to apologize for the shooting in Poland

Kulene suste da Dagsrevyen’s Europe correspondent Roger Severin Bruland in a news report Thursday test shot an automatic rifle of the type Kalashnikov. Bruland was at a private shooting school in Poland, where people learned to use rifles and pistols. Innocent enough in itself perhaps, not least because there is war going on in neighboring Ukraine and because many Poles fear that their homeland could become Vladimir Putin’s next target.

Bruland ended with a stand-up with Kalashnikov.

Several reacted to the feature. After I wrote an article about the case in online newspapers kampanje.com this morning, NRK’s ​​foreign editor Sigurd Falkenberg took Mikkelsen shortly after self-criticism on behalf of the agency.

In an email to Kampanje, Mikkelsen wrote:

– The intention behind the feature was to show how many Poles do shooting training and do it in an inclusive and enlightening way. Shooting is both a sports and leisure activity for many people around the world, also in Norway. But with the context in which Europe now stands, with the war in Ukraine, we should think differently about exactly the part where we participate in the actual shooting training. We see that it can send the wrong signal. Of course, NRK’s ​​journalists are always unarmed when we cover war and conflict, he says.

What was wrong with this? As a former long-time foreign and war reporter in Dagbladet, I have little sense of such stunts. There are limits!

Here is some of what I wrote in kampanje.com:

1. Even if the myth of the objective journalist is greatly exaggerated, one should in any case show sympathy or antipathy as impartially as possible. A reporter who uses such tools as Bruland did the other day can easily become a piece in the propaganda war that is going on in connection with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

2. This weapons training did not take place in Ukraine, but in neighboring Poland. We know that many Poles know their history as a satellite state under the Soviet Union until 1989 and that the fear of a new occupation is present. But we also know that Poland is one of Europe’s most xenophobic countries, and that there are extreme right-wing groups that want their country free of Muslims and other people of other skin colors. For these groups, it is a gift package that it has now become so popular to join a shooting group. Future plans for violent actions against “internal enemies” can be disguised as a desire to defend their country against Russian invaders. The result can be catastrophic.

Journalists must wear a bulletproof vest and helmet in war and in war situations, not weapons. Now the Ukraine war is a conflict in which the occupied party in some places has almost one hundred percent support in the Western world. With that does not matter. A journalist should by definition be unarmed.

4. Let’s stretch the elastic a little. What if a journalist from a respected national or international media house allows himself to be portrayed with a weapon in an Israeli or Palestinian context? Or in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria? The criticism will probably hail. But it might be a good picture to hang on the bragging wall at home. Or should we say the firewall?

– Propaganda-like

I’m a big admirer by Roger Severin Bruland’s Journalism. He is skilled and competent. He did a wonderful, courageous and thorough job over large parts of Europe during the corona pandemic. He showed the horrors of the disease, the despair of hospital staff and relatives, but stood fearless and rock-solid in the storm. During the Ukraine War, Bruland has also emerged as one of the best communicators, with many great reports and angles.

Maybe it was just the angle Bruland thought was good in the report from the Polish firing range, I do not know. But this sends a bad signal and makes the reporter a participant and not an observer.

Fortunately, NRK also realized this.

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