TV 2 Rasmus Wallbridge prank international coverage, Digi Mart USA News (Denmark): Widespread criticism and outrage over TV 2’s prank on Danish comedian Rasmus Wallbridge has spilled across the country’s borders. One week after criticism gained real momentum following the release and later removal of the program “Alle elsker Rasmus” (“Everyone Loves Rasmus”), the story is making headlines in the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Russia and India.
The British newspaper The Times headlined its report “Danish comedian duped into filming ‘Truman show’ without his consent.” The reference to the 1998 film starring Jim Carrey, whose character unknowingly lives his life as the subject of a television experiment, also appears in the British tabloid The Sun, which wrote “No laughing matter.”
Another British paper, the Daily Mail, noted that the comedian was deceived for a full four months. The paper reported that the Danish public was outraged by the program and did not view it as a fascinating psychological experiment, but as bullying or torture, and it also noted political reactions, most recently from Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (Social Democrats).
In Germany, the news agency dpa, as reported via the magazine Focus, called the affair a “TV scandal” and stated in its headline that Rasmus Wallbridge had been “publicly humiliated for months.” In Sweden, SVT interviewed Niels Pinborg, editor-in-chief of Se og Hør, who has been a prominent critic in Denmark. The SVT article’s Swedish headline read “Komikern grundlurades av TV 2 – danskarna rasar” (“Comedian totally duped by TV 2 – Danes are furious”).
Pinborg said in a video, “It is about what we as a society should accept when it comes to our state-owned media.”
Norway’s NRK described the withdrawal of the “prank program,” as it is called in Norwegian, in a brief update last week. The story also reached Russia and India: the independent Russian outlet Meduza and the Indian newspaper Hindustan Times have both covered it.
Winni Johansen, a professor of communication at Aarhus University who studies corporate crisis communication, said international attention is likely due to the moral dimension of the case and the fact that it is a media scandal. She argued that the international attention makes the situation worse for TV 2, because it damages the broadcaster’s reputation more than domestic criticism alone would, and because it may draw the attention of TV 2’s foreign partners.
Johansen described the situation as what crisis research calls a “sticky crisis,” typically arising in cases of moral questions that are harder for organizations to escape. She said such cases can lead viewers to question the broader ethical compass of the organization.
“There is a lot of discussion at the moment about whether one should trust the media. So if they on top of that fail to set their own boundaries, then we really have a problem.
It amplifies the crisis,” she said.
Johansen said clear answers to the public will be needed once TV 2’s investigation of the program is complete. “They need to tell us what they will do to ensure it does not happen again.
But they also need to explain what went wrong. One expects a proper explanation,” she said.
TV 2 has said it will launch an investigation into the sequence of events surrounding “Alle elsker Rasmus.” The investigation will be led by TV 2’s audience editor, Lars Bennike, and the broadcaster’s legal department. The affair has also been treated satirically in the podcast “Med al respekt.”
