Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.11.2011, Blaðsíða 10

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Iceland in the international eye | November
“This so-called social me-
dia has transformed our
democratic institutions in
such a way that what takes
place in more traditional institutions of
power—congress, ministries, even the
White House…has become almost a
sideshow.”
—Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, Presi-
dent of Iceland in an interview with
CNN
If anything’s for sale here in Iceland, you
can be sure its president, Ólafur Ragnar
Grímsson, is already flogging it. As part
of the ‘Inspired by Iceland’ marketing ini-
tiative, everyone is invited to visit Ólafur
at Bessastaðir to enjoy conversation and
traditional Icelandic pancakes with straw-
berry jam and cream the way his grandma
made them.
This invitation is readily available on
Vimeo to all who dare to come.
Aside from pancakes, Ólafur waxes
lyrical on all manner of subjects. Current
favourites include the future of Iceland’s
geothermal energy in the scheme of future
global economics, how the Chinese gov-
ernment is more of a friend to Iceland than
the US and Europe, how Iceland is growing
its high-tech industries and setting itself
up to be a global leader, and—in the same
breath—how the Icelandic nation’s Face-
book and Twitter pages have fundamentally
changed the face of Icelandic politics; how
social media is setting out to become The
Voice Of The People rather than the local
representatives they elect to their ‘demo-
cratic’ government.
At the recent PopTech conference in
Camden, Maine, USA, Ólafur took home
the gold medal. His lecture won him a
standing ovation from his American audi-
ence. In fact, TreeHugger.com commented
that, “[after Ragnar’s speech] attendees
took to Twitter to wonder if Grímsson might
have been born on a U.S. Navy base in Ice-
land—and therefore eligible to run for politi-
cal office in the United States.”
The World According to Ólafur is—well,
coming up. Iceland, he says, has taken ac-
count of its mistakes. In fact, as he was re-
cently quoted by CNN as saying, “…former
[Icelandic] bankers [have] found new jobs
in other industries that are, on the whole,
more helpful for the country.”
That is, rather than being called to face
the judicial process.
“We are coming out of this crisis earlier
and more effectively that I think anyone,
including ourselves, could have expected,”
Ólafur says. “Iceland is now serving as an
example of how you can get out of a very
deep financial and economic crisis.”
According to Ólafur, either way you look
at it, Iceland has—through ingenuity and
the IMF’s careful planning—manoeuvred
its way out of the tidal wave. Unlike other
countries, Iceland did not bail out the banks.
As very recently stated by Nobel Laureate
Paul Krugman in the New York Times, “Ice-
land’s very desperation made conventional
behaviour impossible, freeing the nation to
break the rules. When everyone else bailed
out the bankers and made the public pay
the price, Iceland let the banks go bust
and actually expanded its social safety net.
Where everyone else was fixated on trying
to placate international investors, Iceland
imposed temporary controls on movement
of capital to give itself room to manoeuvre.”
Spending cuts are apparently not the
answer. In the light of ‘Occupy Wall Street,’
Greece and Portugal, Iceland, no doubt,
looks like a serious candidate for an eco-
nomic poster child, and Ólafur is rightly
capitalising on that candidacy. In his CNN
interview, he says, “I chose the will of the
people over the force of the market.”
I know, it sounds like something out of
Lenin’s ‘The State and the Revolution.’
The Financial Times is optimistic, but a
trifle more guarded: “Although [in Iceland]
there is cause for optimism, a note of cau-
tion should be sounded. Recent events in
Europe, in Greece in particular, have cast
the Icelandic recovery in a certain fashion
that is in danger of obscuring the country’s
true plight.”
What is that true plight? I’m sure every
Icelander would love to know—especially
when clutching an egg ready to be hurled
at any member of the Alþingi.
And then, with CNN, Ólafur starts to get
really interesting. What has fundamentally
changed the world, he waxes, what drives
peoples’ movements today is social media.
Today normal people are starting to make a
change in the way governments work.
Tell that to the 13 Chinese citizens who
have Facebook or Twitter accounts. (The
Chinese Communist Party strictly monitors
social [not socialist] networks.)
Meanwhile, do note that even if Ólafur
cannot solve Iceland’s—or even the world’s
‘democratic’ problems (economic, environ-
mental, or otherwise)—he’s talking the talk.
Either way, feel free to drop by his house
to luxuriate at a warm hearth, hear him
spouting forth reams of geothermal wis-
dom, and for Óðin’s sake, try his homemade
pancakes just like grandma made them way
back when.
How Many Eggs Are In A Presidential Pancake?
10
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 17 — 2011
In two recent decisions, the
Reykjavik district court has,
in effect, ruled that truth is
not a valid defence to libel.
Instead, it ruled that newspapers have
a duty not to publish statements about
private individuals that would tend to
damage their reputations, even if they
are true and involve matters that many
would reasonably believe to be in the
public interest.
In one case, the court ruled that a jour-
nalist could be subjected to penalties for
repeating, in an article regarding an inter-
national child custody case, the woman’s
statement that she removed her chil-
dren from Denmark because their father
abused them emotionally and physically.
In a more recent case, it fined a journalist
who wrote a story about a dispute between
neighbours 1.450.000 ISK for quoting pub-
lic court documents from an earlier case
against one of the parties.
In both cases, the journalist was:
(1) quoting an apparently reliable source
(2) about a matter that the newspaper rea-
sonably believed was in the public interest
(3) without opining as to the statements’
veracity.
What is it, exactly, that the courts ex-
pect journalists to do? Avoid stories that
reflect poorly upon private individuals?
Must the newspaper remove a story about
a football match in which a goalie error
costs his team the game, because the
goalie’s reputation as a competent player
will be placed in doubt? Must it stop pub-
lishing stories about criminal trials that
identify the accused, since the accusation
will depend on a statement from a private
person? Will it be precluded from publish-
ing the names of legislators who voted on
bills that ultimately ended up harming the
public, since that might cause them to lose
credibility?
A rule compelling a journalist to guar-
antee the truth of all his factual asser-
tions—and to do so on pain of libel judg-
ments virtually unlimited in amount—will
inevitably lead to self-censorship.
The rule ought to be that, so long as
the journalist relied on at least one au-
thoritative source and had no good reason
to doubt the veracity of that source or the
accuracy of the information he or she pro-
vided, even if that information ultimately
proved to be incorrect or false, the publish-
er has appropriately discharged its duty.
In the custody case, the mother’s quote
was included to explain her actions, not to
justify them. Without the quote, the story
would appear to be an unjustified breach
of the Hague Convention on the Civil As-
pects of International Child Abduction.
With the quote, the issue is different: would
Iceland be justified in refusing to turn over
the children until there was some fact-find-
ing. The story is not complete without her
statement.
With regard to the second case, one
of the unending sources of juicy gossip
is neighbourhood feuding. The court is
right that these disputes should generally
remain private, but once they go beyond
mere words to violence, they become mat-
ters of public concern. We have laws—en-
acted by public bodies, expressing the
public will—outlawing such breaches of the
public order. The public documents quoted
by the journalist permit the reader to deter-
mine for him or herself which side is more
likely to be telling the truth. The quote
does not damage the parties’ reputations
because it is true. They do not deserve to
have reputations based on an incomplete
knowledge of the past. The mere fact that
the documents are more than twenty years
old only goes to the weight that the readers
should assign to them.
A true statement cannot damage
someone’s reputation. If you think some-
one is a wonderful father but are told the
true statement that he abuses his children,
his reputation will be ruined. However, he
never deserved a ‘good reputation’ to be-
gin with. If he enjoys a good reputation be-
cause everyone is ignorant of the inconve-
nient truth, then the reputation is a lie. That
the courts consider it their job to protect
that lie is preposterous. Iceland’s press
failed miserably in the years leading up to
the country’s financial collapse. It failed to
investigate reliable reports of gross abuse
by politicians, bankers, and businessmen,
mostly because the media hardly did any
original, hard news reporting.
According to the Investigative Report,
four out of five Icelandic news stories about
the banks and financial matters originated
from the banks’ PR departments.
Now, however, serious investigative
reporting is impossible because of the dra-
conian nature of our country’s defamation
laws. As a people, we feel a certain shame
in airing our dirty laundry in public, but too
much harm has already resulted from our
ostrich-like avoidance of unpleasant facts.
If the Icelandic Constitution’s guaran-
tee of freedom of expression is to mean
anything, it must guarantee the right to
publish true statements. If we are to have
an open debate on public issues, we must
permit the publication of properly-attrib-
uted quotations from apparently reliable
sources. Any remedy for libellous state-
ments in that situation must be solely
against the speaker, not against the pub-
lisher.
Opinion | Íris Erlingsdóttir
Icelandic courts have problems with the truth
Inconvenient Truths
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