Man tror Gud hjælpe mig, at ytringsfriheden betyder ytringsfrihed for Danmarks Radios medarbejdere. Det er en misforståelse. Den ytringsfrihed fastsættes her i radiorådet

But God help me, if freedom of expression means freedom of expression for Danish Radio employees. That’s a misunderstanding. Freedom  of expression is secured here on the broadcasting board.

Jacobsen was a former socialist who thought Danish radio was subject to Communist influence. In particular, he thought that children’ s programming was trying to breed a generation of Reds.

I don’t normally agree with these people. I tend to agree with the quote though.

It reminds me of Oliver Wendell Holme’s quip in McAuliffe v. New Bedford (1892):

“The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, … but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman”

Asked on whether his previous experience of navigating in a political environment (chairman of the student union in ‘67-’68), he argued that, more than his student experience, the experience of working in the Environment and Finance Ministries had given him experience of organisations which were both large and political.

I was conscious that I seemed to be repeating ground covered in Nissen’s book when I asked about his relationships with staff at DR: initial opposition from the unions (which disintegrated as the unions lost their ability to impose “black screens” on the population), coupled with an executive board which seemed luke-warm towards Nissen.

Turning towards the board, Nissen was appreciative of the work done by Finn Aaberg in smoothing the egos of board members, and ensuring that board decisions were typically taken by over-lapping and over-sized (8-3) majorities. Nissen’s view on Aaberg’s successor, J\orgen Kleener, was more nuanced. Kleener had told Nissen that he’d come with a list of 100 items to be changed in DR, presumably coming from Claus Hjort Frederiksen (V), Labour minister in both Fogh Rasmussen governments. (This, it seems, was the key channel through which political pressure was channeled; Brian Mikkelsen’s involvement, although highly publicised, may be a red herring). Over time, Kleener seemed to be “going native”, as he admitted to Nissen that many of the items on the list were either implausible or had already been implemented. Nissen claims, however, that Venstre started putting pressure on Kleener in the run-up to the election as the party started mobilizing. At first, it seemed unlikely that Nissen would be pushed out before the election; he was initially told that he would be dismissed in summer 2005 (thus after a February election). For whatever reason, the timetable got shorter, and Kleener managed to persuade other board members – who had come to see Nissen as too heavy-handed – that, if it came down to a choice between Kleener or Nissen, they would have to keep Nissen. Ironically, Nissen had laid the seeds of his own downfall: he’d refused the boilerplate DR contract, which would have given him greater job security and have required dismissal to be motivated, for his own, which allowed dismissal for whatever reason.
Towards the end Nissen mentioned that he was thinking of starting up an ex- Director General’s club with Greg Dyke. Although both were forced to leave at roughly the same time by governments at war, I do wonder how they get on: Nissen the axe-wielder, and Dyke perceived (at least by the current DG) as a profligate spender…

As Haagerup’s wikipedia entry shows, he’s risen up the ranks quickly. In response to my rather open-ended questions, he gave well-crafted polished answers typical of other news executives I’ve interviewed. Of course, well-crafted and polished answers are not always the kind of answers that social scientists (or journalists, for that matter) appreciate.

It was interesting to find out that Haagerup had been appointed as Head of News without an open competition. That wasn’t because it was a rush appointment; on the contrary, Haagerup’s predecessor, Lisbeth Knudsen, had resigned some months earlier. Rather, the issue of who to appoint had been mulled over, and Haagerup’s experience in multi-media, and extraneity to DR and the kind of politics that may involve, was an advantage.

When I asked how he would ensure that incidents like Jeppe Nybroe’s footage from Iraq wouldn’t happen again, he gave a perfect answer: he couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t happen again, but part of what he wanted to do was to make sure that DR recruited the best journalists, people who are interested in telling the story rather than (necessarily) career progression. Structures – like the program ethics, like listeners’ and viewers’ editors – were downplayed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about structures in the wake of recent problems in the BBC. Is something like the BBC Editorial Guidelines just a luxury that an extremely large organisation can afford? Are structures like that made necessary by the BBC’s size? Can a smaller organisation like DR rely on hiring policy and on-the-job socialisation to minimize mistakes, or is that just self-delusion?

In any event, it doesn’t seem like DR’s program ethics are filling the same publicity role that the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines are in the UK: Haagerup suggested that few outside of DR were likely to have heard of them.

Baumann was a bit more solid and substantial than the DR-Byen. He’s worked with DR since 1987, after having worked, from 1976, for a now defunct trade union newspaper. His former newspaper had been taken over by new owners, and he said that he didn’t appreciate the new editorial line they were going to take. He said that he either wanted to be with a newspaper or company whose editorial line he agreed with, or with a public service broadcaster, where he could be neutral; he wouldn’t fake agreement with an editorial line he disagreed with. I asked him whether, given that he did have strong ideas about the political line his preferred media would take, that meant that he wasn’t just “faking” neutrality.

His reply was pretty pragmatic: “that’s a philosophical question”, he said. Not for the first time, I was reminded of a quote from Dario Papa, Italian journalist who had spent some time in America:

“la differenza tra il giornalismo alla latina e quello all’americana potrebbe esprimersi cosi: che noi siamo una truppa di professori e quelli la sono una truppa di soldati”

[the difference between Latin journalism and American journalism may be put like this: we are a bunch of professors, they're a troup of soldiers].

Substitute American for Northern European, and the comparison still works.

Baumann’s area of journalistic expertise is, again, more solid and substantial: he’s security and defence correspondent for Orientering, having previously worked on Radioavisen in foreign and security issues. He said that his team on Orientering was subject to a fair amount of criticism: whilst they had previously been in the mainstream, they were now perceived in certain quarters as being on the left; Baumann suggested that was because the country shifted to the right, rather than any leftward shift amongst the fourteen staff with Orientering. Criticism came principally from the Danish People’s Party and occasionally from Venstre, but also from a think-tank called CEPOS.

With the interviw a day after wildcat demonstrations (slogan: “Let DR live!”), we talked a lot about DR’s HR policies and trade unionism. He said that DR was pursuing two policies in particular: differentiation of wages – paying more to those who are tempted to jump ship, whilst lowering the base salary -; and generalism over specialism. Specialist correspondents are expensive, after all.

As Johannes Reimer had suggested the previous day, Tage did agree that those who worked for DR in Copenhagen did not always feel proud to be working for DR. This is perhaps because DR’s follies – a new expensive studio in Radhusplads in the same year as the DR-Byen overspend – are more visible in the capital; or because DR journalists move in more politically connected circles when in the capital. Still, a job in DR for someone coming out of the College of Journalism would still be prestigious, as long as they were prepared to be a specialist in broadcast journalism and a subject generalist, compared to an older generation that had been more likely to have had some experience in print journalism with a subject specialism.

Talk of the journalism school led on to issues of training, and that led on to the issue of the code of programme ethics. Hopefully, this will lead to a meeting with Jakob Mollerup, listeners’ and viewers’ editor.

Johannes has a slightly awkward schedule, working one week as the program-chief for the early morning 6am to 10am programme, then next week switching over to the afternoon programme  from 3 to 6pm, as host. Despite the shifting hours, Johannes likes working in the radio. Indeed, he left a job as communications-chief for the local council in order to return to radio after only 1 1/2 years. I asked him whether he thought having worked as a communications-chief for the council was a help or a hindrance in his role as a journalist. He said that, whilst friends had joked, saying that now they’d be able to call on him to ‘explain’ things better, he was quite clear that that couldn’t happen; and that in any case, it was an advantage to understand how civil servants worked. It was, after all, a relatively common career move.

As with previous interviews, Johannes seemed quite angry with management or board members who caused DR to appear in the press. He still felt proud, he said, but the management involvement in things like Orestaden was either incompetent or wilfully negligent. Certainly, he knew people in Copenhagen who said that they weren’t proud to work for DR any longer, but that was unlikely to happen in Aarhus.

He was partly critical of the recent reorganisation of DR Aarhus, in that, whilst recognising the benefits of building work around project-oriented teams, ‘news’ is an ongoing activity, which can’t be structured like an ongoing project. I certainly found it strange that his boss, since not a formal project-leader, can’t hire or fire or set the budget for the news organisation.

Johannes was quite convincing on the subject of the code of programme ethics, noting that, even if a written version was relatively novel (how novel no-one seems to know), there’s always been some appreciation of fundamental values at DR, part of which comes from journalistic training – and which is therefore not necessarily shared by other programme-workers -, part of which comes from something in the air.

I ended the interview by asking whether one mightn’t get the wrong impression from looking at DR and considering just the period from 2001 onwards, and whether there wasn’t also controversy before in the eighties. He mentioned a campaign in the seventies and eighties looking for “socialist” orientations in DR: so now I have to look up “Aktive Lyttere og Seere” and Erhardt Jakobsen.

She said that around half of the 25 journalists she represented were DR-”lifers”, but that it was likely to change from now on. Pay was not significantly higher outside of DR, although TV2 could afford to pay a little bit more. Despite the reorganisation and the redundancies, morale was still high, although there was some hesitation when I asked whether people were still proud to work for DR.

Like others I’ve interviewed, Dianna was aware of the longterm consequences of politicians’ complaints – of anticipating their reactions and opting for a quiet life – but argued that 90% – 100% of her colleagues would agree that DR was independent of political interests. As far as political criticism was concerned, most of the criticism they got tended to come from the right: she cited one example of a DF supporter who believed that party leaders had been treated in a mocking style.

One thing that did emerge was the genuine irritation of journalists at board members who weigh in on specific programmes (this is also something I’ve come across in analysing parliamentary questions on DR). The specific example given was Ole Hyltoft’s call for P3 – the youth network – to broadcast more traditional songs (gamle schlager), which led to him being ticked off by the DG. Maybe the off-hand comments of board members are driving people’s perceptions of DR’s internal politics- “if the board is like this, what must the journalists be like?”-style thinking.

The morning started off with a news-story that complaints to DR had risen; but Dianna admitted that most of the complaints passed to her could be resolved quickly with an email, without registering the complaint formally. Hopefully I’ll find more about the complaints process if I succeed in meeting DR’s Listeners’ and Viewers’ Editor.

1st April 1925: “Statsradiofonien” starts broadcasting trials

1926: Statsradiofonien begins to broadcast news in co-operation with the daily press, who provide the news for “Pressens Radioavis”.

2nd October 1952: TV begins in Demark.

1954: Daily TV broadcasts begin

1959: “Statsradiofonien” changes name to Danmarks Radio.

1964: The press stops providing DR with its news; “Pressens Radioavis” becomes “Radioavisen”

1984: Competition at a local level from local tv and radio stations

1987:  Radioraadet becomes the DR-board [DR-bestyrelse] wit 11 members. Advisory Programme Council with 30 members also formed.

1988: Monopoly on national TV broadcasting  ended as TV2 starts broadcasts.

1996: DR gets a second tv channel, DR2.

2002: The two governing parties and the Dansk Folkparti approve a new media agreement until 2007

2004: DR-board decides that DR should have a listeners’ and viewers’ editor, who shall handle criticisms of news coverage.

2006: New media-agreement for the period 2007-10. Costs spiral for the new DR building in Orestad.

Blot til orientering saa blev DR’s daekning af regeringen og speciet Irak krigen taget op paa ministermoedet i dag foerst under morgenmaden af mange ministre og dernaest under det formelle moede. Der er en meget stor utilfreshed med DR’s daekning som er meget ensidig – de har specielt set sig sure paa et par kvindelige vaerter og Ole Sippel (some mange naevnte som ekstrem i sine udtryk mod koalitionen). Det kom derhen til at udenrigministeren mente at vi ikke burde privatisere TV-2 som var fair i daekningen, men snarere DR. Netopdet forhold et det staerkende borgerlige argument mod privatiseringen af TV-2. Mange borgerlige mener at vi burde privatisere DR, some er anti regeringen, mens de ikke forstaar at vi privatiserer TV-2 som er positiv over for regeringen. Jeg ved godt at det er svaert for dig – i morgen var jeg saa i skudlinien for det var pludselig mit ansvar – men du skal have besked om regeringens holding. Jeg naevnte henvendt til statsministeren, at jeg loebende havde en fortrolig dialog med dig om tingenes tilstand. Og at jeg havde indtryk af at bestyrelsen og nissen tog det meget seiroest, men problemet laa hos Lisbeth Knudsen

If only to [inform you] then DR’s covering of the government and specially the Iraq war was gone up on the meeting of ministers today only under the breakfast by many ministers and next during the formal meeting.

There is a very large utilfreshed with DR’s covering that is very onesided – they have especially seen themselves cross with a couple of female hosts and Ole Sippel (some many mentioned as an extreme in their expressions against the coalition).

That came there to that the [Foreign Minister] thought that we ought not to privatise Tv that was fair in [its coverage], but rather DR.

The Netopd conditions an it starling-a little [bourgeoi] sargument against the privatisation of Tv.

Many [members of the bourgeois party] think that we ought to privatise DR, some is anti- the government, while they do not understand that we privatise Tv that is positive face to face with the government.

I know well that it’s difficult for you – tomorrow I was in the line of fire for it suddenly my responsibility was – but you have to have message about the government’s holding.

I mentioned turned for the prime minister that I had a confidential dialogue with you about the state of things.

And that I had impressions of that the management and Nissen took it very seriously, but the problem lay with Lisbeth Knudsen [director of news]

More coverage from the Copenhagen Post.