Norwegian soldiers from the Telemark Battalion training in Afghanistan
Norway is at war in Afghanistan. Militarily Norway contributes with 700 soldiers in the NATO led ISAF-force. In 2007 Norwegian contributed with NOK 450 million in humanitarian and development aid. For a career officer in the Norwegian army, it’s become almost compulsory to spend a term in what Kipling called “the great game”. One would therefore expect that Afghanistan would be very much in the forefront of Norwegian news. Interestingly enough, this in not the case to the extent that one would expect.
We ran a check on Webavisen.no, which searches 240 Norwegian news sources, with the searchwords Afghanistan and Israel for the week between March 21st and March 27th. We find that Norwegian media ran 149 headlines on Israel. Israel is a little country in the Middle East with which we have very little trade and cultural contact. In the same timespan there were 163 headlines on Afghanistan, where we are at war and have committed ourselves to national reconstruction. This week then, the diffence between being at full scale war in a country and observing various degrees of conflict concerning Israel is 14 headlines.
Are these findings relevant for only this one week or is it a pattern? Let’s elaborate a little bit on this in the time ahead and see what we find, shall we?
