V for very undemocratic

I've just seen the excellent film "V for vendetta", expecting a standard Hollywood action. But instead I saw a film which got me thinking about fascism and how dangerously close to it we sometimes are.

While the original comic book by Alan Moore and David Lloyd has been altered somewhat to better fit the big screen, bot the comic and the film gives me an eerie feeling. In the foreword to the most recent release of the comic, moore says he wrote the comic partially as a response to Thatcerism and what he believed to be subtle signs of an emerging police state. The movie gives us more than one hint that the chaos the world was plunged into in the years before the story begins was a result of American actions and hostility during the war on terror.

And that is why the story scares me. Are we not creeping slowly towards a police state? Fear of terrorism has made most Americans accept more and more surveillance in their daily lives. The same things are happening in Britain and, to a lesser, degree, in other countries. In order to fight terrorism, the US has moved hundreds of people to Guantanamo. People who have not received a fair trial. And who do not know when or if they will ever be released. US and British troops have commited several acts of torture in Iraq. While their governments claim that these acts have been commited by individual soldiers, US president Bush has proposed legislation that would allow US forces to torture prisoners.

Are these acts commited by a healthy, humane democracy? Torture and imprisonment without legal processing have been used many times in modern history, but always by regimes that were inherently non-democratic. Nazi Germany, fascist italy and Spain, the communist Soviet union...

Is it not then a warning signal to the state of democracy when we close our eyes to such acts? Should we accept using non-democratic tools in the fight to preserve democracy? When we accept governement intervention in our daily lives,close our eyes to human right's abuse in Iraq and Guantanamo, how are we any better than the regimes we fight against?

The difference is becoming blurry to me.

Media jobs disappearing

Norwegian tabloid VG has announced that it wants to downsize their staff by 70-90 employees. The move comes as VG's circulation is down by 10 percent as well as experiencing falling advertising revenues.

Norwegian media jobs are disappearing in their hundreds. Dagbladet announced job cuts several months ago, and Orkla Media, owner of several local newspapers, web sites and radio stations, are also considering staff cutbacks.

Statistics don't lie. Readers move from print to the web, and owners have to react. But for many papers, cutting back on staff also means sacrificing quality, which might escalate the falling circulation numbers. And while the web is becoming ever more popular and internet advertising is increasing, the print edition is still responsible for 80% of the papers' revenue. If circulation numbers keep falling, the companies will have to act. Readers might have to choose between paying for good content or receiving poor quality free content.

Publishing an online newspaper is a lot cheaper than its print sibling. No printing or distribution costs, and staff numbers can be a lot lower. But do we as consumers want news services that do no more than recycle each others' stories? Most "news" web sites today do this. The same story is published simultaneously on different sites, using the same news agencies as their source. If this is where we are headed, I fear that news coverage in the information age will be poor and of little real value. At least not if we stick with the notion of the media as society's watchdog.