(JTA) — A Norwegian newspaper removed an Op-Ed on its website asserting that U.S. media are unreliable because they are “dominated by Jews.”
The opinion article, titled “Is there Jewish Dominance over International and Norwegian Media?,” by the pro-Palestinian activist Siri Lill Thowsen, was taken down Monday from the site of the Oslo-based daily Dagsavisen because it “gives support to old conspiracy theories about Jews controlling media,” Managing Editor and Foreign News Editor Ivar Iversen told JTA.
Readers complained to Dagsavisen about the Op-Ed, which did not appear in the print edition but was published online Sunday in the New Opinions section of www.dagsavisen. The section is open to registered users and moderated only after new content is published, Iversen said.
In the Op-Ed, Thowsen wrote, “It has been claimed that over 50 percent of U.S. media are dominated by … [people] who have a Jewish affiliation. And so we assume that the news from many U.S. media is angled from a pro-Israel point of view and news of the Palestinian people’s human rights and legal protection rarely reaches the media.”
After the item’s removal, Thowsen complained of “censorship” and posted the text on her Facebook page. She then reposted the article on the Dagsavisen platform along with Iversen’s letter to her explaining why it had been removed.
Several readers complained that the Op-Ed was inappropriate for Dagsavisen, Iversen said.
“We want to avoid any confusion between the opinions expressed in the article and the paper’s own views,” he added.
Ervin Kohn, president of the Jewish Community in Oslo, told JTA that the removal of the Op-Ed “shows that Norwegian media editors take their responsibilities seriously.”
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