October 25, 2012 By Bruce Bawer
The partiality of the news media, heaven knows, is an international phenomenon. But there are few places on this fragile blue planet of ours where consumers are forced to shell out so much money to be fed so much outright, shameless, and (not infrequently) downright vile propaganda as is the case in little Norway. At present every Norwegian household that owns a TV must pay an annual “license fee” of $451.00 a year to subsidize NRK, the government-owned TV and radio network. (Next year the fee will climb to $568.57.) You have to pay, even if you never, ever watch NRK, most of whose programming is not unlike a triple dose of Ambien. Take the schedule for Wednesday, October 24, which consisted of a blizzard of national and local news programs (one of them in Sami); “Murder, She Wrote”; reality shows, one set on a remote Finnish island, another on a Danish chestnut farm whose proprietors run it “the good old-fashioned way”; an investigative program that asked why the number of moose in Norway has tripled in the last decade; and a musical tribute to United Nations Day by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. (You may not know that October 24 is United Nations Day, but I can assure you that every kid in Norway does.) To Read More…..and he comes to the point by the way.
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