Stúdentablaðið - 01.12.2008, Blaðsíða 28

28 EN STÚDENTABLAÐIÐ
be renting for a longer period. If you’re able to
provide a confirmation of this ffom Student Housing,
you may still be able to apply as long as you send in
your new contract once you get it.
• An official stamp on your lease (þinglýsing) that
you get from your friendly neighbourhood Sýslu-
maður. For students fiving in Reylqavík, Skógarhlíö
6 is the place to go.
• A certificate of residence from Statistics Iceland
(unless you permit local authorities to access your
information from Statistics Iceland, which seems
easier)
• Information on any money you eam while in
Iceland. If you’re employed in Iceland, you can give
your local authority permission to access your
information from Mr. Icelandic Taxman. If you’re
self-employed, however, you should include
information on your monthly eamings.
• An Icelandic bank account into which to deposit
the money. Or, should all the Icelandic banks have
gone under by the time this goes to press, a nice,
sturdy Icelandic sock.
Only one person per rental flat is eligible for rent
benefit (unless you’re in a shared apartment from
Student Housing), so tenants renting a house
together need to come to an agreement among
themselves about who should be paid this rent
benefit and how it should be distributed. If you only
rent a single room, you cannot apply for this
refimd.
If you’ve read this far and it sounds like you’re
indeed eligible, it’s important to apply as soon as
possible. If you apply by the 16th of this month,
you’ll receive rent benefit for the month. However,
you won’t get paid the benefit for any months you
pay rent before applying for the refund.
Where to apply? Go to the social services office
nearest you. For most students, this will probably
be Þjónustumiðstöð Vesturbœjar (Hjarðarhagi 45-
47) or Þjónustumiðstöð Miðborg og Hlíðar
(Skúlagata 21). Information on other Reykjavík
social services oöices can be found at the English
version of rvk.is under Social Advisory Services. If
you’re in Kópavogur, go to the Félagsþjónusta office
at Fannborg 4. If you call Seltjamames home, hunt
down the Félagsþjónusta Mýrarhúsaskóla on
Nesvegur. Forms are (of course) in Icelandic, but
social services staff are friendly and willing to assist,
especially if you bring them baked goods and a
smile. You’ll have to renew your appfication again at
the beginning of next year if you want to keep on
getting money in 2009, so think of it as an opportunity
to foster a rewarding relationship with those who
work to make your community a better (and
cheaper) place.
Still wondering what the catch is? Will you have to
pay this money back at some point? Does the fine
print include a pledge for several litres of your
blood? No, although blood donation isn’t a bad idea
at all these days - stop by the blood bank at
Snorrabraut 60 and you even get a free meal. If you
want to delve into the nitty-gritty details on rent
benefit, go to the Ministry of Social Affairs website,
where you’ll find an English booklet on the
subject.
B Katie Parsons
Translations
P.8-9
PLAYING WITH ANIMMORAL MOB
When you critique the media [...] they get very
angry. They say, quite correctly, “nobody ever
tells me what to write. I write anything I like.
All this business about pressures and cons-
traints is nonsense because I’m never under
anypressure. ” Which is completely true, but the
point is that they wouldn't be there unless they
had already demonstrated that nobody has to
tell them what to write because they are going
say the right thing.
(Noam Chomsky)
Correct me when you think I’m going off the
rails: The purpose of the media in a democratic
society should be to maintain a critical discourse,
to inform, dig deep, ask questions and continue
asking until an answer is received. The media
should always be part of the opposition. The
media should never regurgitate the govemment’s
press releases without digesting them first. The
media should not be the leaders’ lackeys.
Who’s undermining whose trust in what?
I sort of thought this all went without saying,
but Páll Magnússon, director general of the
Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (RÚV),
obviously disagrees. A former RÚV employee
comes forward with a recording showing the PM
raging at a reporter simply for expecting him to
answer questions about his work and policies.
Páll Magnússon’s reaction is threatening said
reporter with a lawsuit, on the grounds that
making the recording public undermines the
public’s trust in RÚV. Whose side is Páll on? Not
his former employees’, and not that of the public,
who aren’t allowed to see how the PM really
treats reporters. His “side” is probably that of all
the other guys in the DiamondEncrustedLuxury-
JeepClub. Former radio host Helga Vala Helga-
dóttir also tells of an ex-PM’s angry raving and
threats from a current government minister.
Former RÚV reporter Björg Eva Erlendsdóttir
has made the statement that an Independence
Party membership card has been a necessity at
the news department and that their interference
was incessant. But hang on - the key word here
is “former”, because all these people have left
RÚV and now speak out at a relatively safe
distance. Better late then never - but why on
earth weren’t we told this at the time? Why did
these otherwise intelligent and well-informed
people subject themselves to this sort of
suppression? And if this is what’s been going on
at RÚV for all these yeans, then what’s happening
there right now, when the govemment has more
at stake in controlling the discourse than ever
before?
The govemment, Alþingi and regulatory bodies
in the finance sector are not the only entities
we’ve lost all faith in. The Icelandic media are
close behind. Recently, they started letting people
go over at RÚV under the pretext of downsizing;
obviously, the wages of technicians, hosts of the
daily moming exercises and regional reporters
go a long way towards covering the wages of Páll
Magnússon and Þórhallur Gunnarsson, director
of domestic production. I wonder how diligent
people are at criticizing their own employers
when the threat of unemployment looms?
Uncle’s pissed again
Everyone has long since realised that the
Icelandic media lay snoring by the roadside,
drunk off free champagne courtesy of various
father-and-son business combos, while private
jetters and incompetent leaders ruined the
nation. Foreign media discussed the groundless
expansion of the banking system, but their
Icelandic counterparts popped down to the
govemment offices, stuck the microphone at
ministers’ faces, nodded obligingly and giggled
with Þorgerður Katrín over the silly foreigners in
need of a re-education. How very witty! God’s
chosen people always knew better. Nobody could
be bothered to investigate further, nobody dared
press the government on the issue, or maybe
somebody did and they edited it out and now it’s
lying somewhere in a drawer at Stöð 2
headquarters or an empty office at RÚV - what
the heck do we know, anyway?
The government is a bit like the family
alcoholic, the drunken uncle whose antics
embarrass everyone at family parties; everybody
knows but it never goes any further because the
family is caught in the net of co-dependency.
Prayer meetings, riots and declining morals
But what have the media been doing since the
train finally derailed for good, since the collapse
of the banks made it impossible for them to close
their eyes and deliver up-beat items about queues
for American toy stores, fabulous birthday
parties and the totally awesome economic
growth?
First of all, there was Crowd Control, which
began almost the minute Glitnir bank was
nationalized. This was especially prominent in
the printed media in the early days of the
recession. We were treated to interviews with
one priest after another, all of whom encouraged
us to unite and stay calm. The public was invited
to prayer meetings and church events, as if the
smartest thing the nation could do would be to
swiftly swap from their blind faith in one
dogmatic ideology to the next one. On
Morgunblaðið’s front page, we saw children
doing arts and crafts, visiting the National
Museum, making slátur, dressing up for
Hallowe’en and celebrating their nurseiy school’s
anniversary. One can safely say the ratio of
nursery school children on the paper’s front page
has never been as high as during these last few
weeks. The imagery all pointed in the same
direction: Solidarity and unity. Calm down. At the
same time, the govemment wamed against witch
hunts, encouraged the public to keep its cool and
repeated the much-flaunted solidarity cliché, as
if we were all one nation and all in the same boat
- as if you and I, Geir, Ingibjörg, Davíð, Jón Ásgeir
and Björgólfur & Björgólfur were all travelling
the same class.
Even though Geir and company tried to get us
to shut up and start rowing the ubiquitous
“national ship” (as the Vikings sailed their private
yachts full throttle towards the Caymans), the
undercurrent grew stronger and people began to
protest. A new image in Icelandic broadcasting
emerged: The War Correspondent. Parka-clad
TV reporters with condemning looks reported
riots and egg throwing and edited dramatic
videos of scuffles by Alþingi. “A riot broke out at
a demonstration by Alþingishúsið today,” Logi
Bergmann told us, grief-stricken, and announced
that Alþingi had been “besmirched” with eggs
and various foodstuffs. This writer was unlucky
enough to miss this awful fray, along with
thousands of other demonstrators - no wonder,
since she stood on the other side of the statue of
Jón Sigurðsson.
When the war correspondents could no longer
milk their three-minute clips of pram-pushing
parents engaged in supposed riots, the Moral
Sermonizer took over. Local sheep connoisseur
Gísli S. Einarsson produced not one but two
items about the nation’s declining morals. The
subject was neither the billionaires’ gambling
with public money nor the government’s
arrogance towards the nation. No, this decline in
morals appeared in the throwing of said eggs,
along with protestor Haukur Hilmarsson’s Bónus
flag (pict. at P.15); of course, democratic
demonstrations are the worst form of attack
against the founding principles of society. Much
like the police at Austurvöllur, Gísli was
immensely saddened by this tragic tum of events.
A philosopher was summoned to answer some
leading questions about morals, but the reporter
had obviously made up his mind. The mob was
immoral.
Let’s break up this private party
The media are slowly waking up to reflect the
currents of society: broadcasting public meetings
and demonstrations, printing more articles by