MANAGER
Celebrating important liberal values is a declaration of bankruptcy.
UNCONSTITUTIONAL: Lawyer Jon Wessel-Aas, who is an expert on freedom of expression, believes it would be unconstitutional to block Russian media. Jonas Gahr Støre has sent various signals about whether Norway will follow the EU, which has blocked the two state-owned media houses, Sputnik and Russia Today. Photo: Heiko Junge / NTB
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Manager: This is an editorial from Dagbladet, and expresses the newspaper’s views. Dagbladet’s political editor is responsible for the editorial.
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In the two Russian online newspapers Sputnik and RT (Russia Today) Norwegians can still read coarse-grained propaganda and wild lies about the war of aggression against Ukraine. While the EU presidency has decided to block the two state-owned media houses, the Støre government is still skeptical about using censorship. There is every reason for that.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre has cited precisely this case as an example of the government making independent assessments and not following the EU in one and all. Nevertheless, he has given various signals about where Norway ends up. In the report to the Storting before the weekend, Støre said that there should be “very good reasons for restricting freedom of expression”, but he also did not rule out that Norway will block the Russian media. In a meeting of the Oslo Editors’ Association earlier the same week, he said it was “natural” to do as the EU.
Reminiscent of Stalin
The different signals have provoked strong reactions from press organizations and lawyers. The censorship proposal is simply unconstitutional, says lawyer Jon Wessel-Aas, who is an expert on media law and freedom of expression. “Section 100 of the Constitution imposes a categorical ban on prior censorship,” he told the newspaper Klassekampen this weekend. Wessel-Aas believes that the day we let the state decide what disinformation is, we are one step closer to autocrats like Putin. Such a decision would be a lazy fit for the Russian dictator, who may point out that the West also pursues censorship.
If a censorship decision is unconstitutional, hopefully the law department will give Støre a clear message. It is also unclear how such a ban can be enforced. The Norwegian Media Authority tells Klassekampen that they have no legal basis for fining platforms that might break the censorship. In any case, we believe it would be wrong to block the two Russian newspapers.
More rearmament is needed
Of course it’s reindeer propaganda served, and readers should not take as much as an ounce for good fish. However, there is information that may be interesting both for the Norwegian press and others, not least to gain insight into what many Russians relate to and what the Putin regime wants to convey. In a war where Ukraine is fighting on behalf of the liberal values of the West, it would be more than a paradox if we celebrated the most basic value of them all. That would be a declaration of bankruptcy.
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