Jørgen Ejbøl and The Muzzling of Flemming Rose, the Mohammed-Cartoons Author
The Sequel
JP editorial independence was consistently and persistently compromised by Jørgen Ejbøl, as chairman of the board of JP/Politikens Hus, owner of Jyllands Posten, who were the original publishers of the blasphemous Mohammad cartoons.
After all their talk of freedom of speech, the national newspaper Jyllands-Posten now appears to have gagged (figuratively) Flemming Rose, the (official-but-now-he-says-another-editor-Jørn-Mikkelsen-put-him-up-to-it) author of the original Mohammed-Cartoon article.
In an email dated 20 May 2011 Jørgen Ejbøl (chairman of the board at JP) has some suggestions as to how to tie the hands of Flemming Rose in an information shut-down.
The bosses at Jyllands-Posten (also known as “The Plague of Jutland” and “The Morning Fascist”) extended the gag from a period of one year to as long as he was employed by Politikens Hus. In a fit of explosive anger Jørgen Ejbøl finally stepped over a line and Flemming Rose travels to Århus on September 28 2015 to formally submit his resignation to Jørn Mikkelsen.
As recently as 7 January 2015, JP’s editor-in-chief, Jørn Mikkelsen, calls Flemming Rose to prevent him from commenting on the Charlie Hedbo killings.
Now, in a book Flemming Rose has just published, he wonders why JP didn’t just fire him.
Possibly, he speculates, because the cartoons weren’t even his idea. It was a task he was assigned by culture director Jørn Mikkelsen and was later sent out to defend.
Jørgen Ejbøl was chairman of the board at JP/Politikens Hus until 2014. Today he is deputy chairman of Jyllands-Posten’s foundation, one of the two financial entities that own JP/Politikens Hus.
Flemming Rose describes Jørgen Ejbøl as a powerful and intimidating leader who manipulated his employees and interfered with editorial decisions; a quite unusual practice for board members.
He attempted to prevent Rose from appearing in the newspaper and also attempted to prevent the publishing of his Hymn to Freedom book in 2015.
For the first time, Ejbøl distances himself from the cartoons, in September 2015, in a break from JP’s unquestioned support for the article.
In Danish there is a (rather cynical) saying:
“Hvis moral er godt så er dobbelt moral dobbelt så godt”
“If standards are good, then double standards are twice as good”
Thank you for reading my story, lifted from Information, who in turn lifted it from Flemming Rose’s new book, “De Besatte”, “The Occupied”.
Information.dk has a second, more interesting article om Flemming Rose’s intellectual defence and his vanity. Read it here:
Let me know in the comments if you’d like me to summarize the main points of this more interesting article.
