Kjetil Wiedswang

Kjetil Wiedswang is a Norwegian journalist who questions how the press handled the Satanism scare imported into Norway in the early 1990s. His account is not a claim that journalists caused the crimes or that readers simply imitate what they see. Rather, he describes an uneasy feedback loop: publicity could make a marginal phenomenon appear more important, furnish notoriety to people eager to provoke, and intensify competition within the Black Metal scene. At the same time, his defense of an unrestricted press makes the quality of reporting, not the existence of coverage, the central issue.

Background and Position

Wiedswang is presented as skeptical of the media’s treatment of Satanism and of the way imported stories of occult threat were handled in Norway. His analysis places sensational coverage alongside a longer history of claims about secret groups committing terrible acts behind a respectable public face. Such stories, he observes, have been directed at many different groups over time, recycled in popular horror, and sometimes returned to public discussion as if they were newly established fact.

His position is critical but not censorious. He recognizes that reporting on disturbing events can be important, and he rejects the idea that journalists should be forced to suppress stories because their consequences cannot be predicted. For him, the responsibility lies in how a story is investigated and presented: rumor and familiar urban legends should not be allowed to acquire the appearance of verified news.

Publicity and the Black Metal Scene

Wiedswang connects media attention to the social rewards available in youth subcultures. In his account, “street cred” mattered, and extensive coverage gave Varg Vikernes a way to build an almost mythic public image. This is not simply a story of journalists describing a figure who already possessed influence. Publicity could itself become one of the resources through which that influence was made.

He also considers how coverage affected the scene beyond any single individual. People within Black Metal later described the period as becoming wilder after the media began concentrating on it. Wiedswang suggests that the attention may have intensified internal competition over who would become the scene’s dominant personality. He does not treat the media as the sole cause: subcultures have their own internal dynamics and can develop independently of outside interest. But the scale of attention in this case, he argues, may have given that attention an unusually large role.

His comparison with terrorism clarifies the mechanism he sees at work. Some acts, he argues, depend in part on becoming news: if nobody reports them, a perpetrator’s effort to attract notice loses part of its purpose. The comparison identifies an incentive, not a universal explanation for violence. Wiedswang acknowledges that it is difficult to prove that Satanic-scare headlines drew people into Black Metal, and cautions against simple models in which audiences automatically copy what they encounter in media. Influence remains plausible, but its pathways are complicated.

Verification Against Rumor

Wiedswang’s concern about reporting is sharpened by the historical pattern he describes. Stories of secret, outwardly respectable groups committing hidden atrocities had circulated for centuries, been attached to different religious and social communities, and later been reshaped by horror fiction. He notes that one account of ritual abuse seemed to reproduce material from Rosemary’s Baby. The resemblance matters as a warning about how inherited stories can shape what people believe they have witnessed or experienced; it is not, by itself, proof that every such report is false.

He gives a specific example of why claims need checking. A woman’s account, printed in the press, described a forced abortion in central Oslo in the 1960s, carried out in an open yard by men in black robes. When the date was examined, it coincided with a bombing spree in which grenades with tripwires had been left in public places. Oslo was then on alert, with people watching for suspicious activity. Wiedswang therefore regarded the story as not credible. The episode illustrates his demand for scrutiny of dates and circumstances, as well as his concern that a vulnerable person’s account might be published without adequate care.

Press Freedom and Responsibility

For Wiedswang, the Satanism coverage’s failure was not that newspapers reported on the subject. Compelling journalists always to anticipate and prevent every consequence, he argues, would risk a worse alternative: censorship. His criticism instead falls on standards of evidence. Reporters should have been more alert to urban legends, especially when similar scares had recently been prominent in Britain and the United States.

That distinction keeps his argument from reducing the press to either an innocent observer or a single cause of the Black Metal crimewave. Attention can give transgressive acts an audience and confer status; sensational framing can make a diffuse danger seem like an organized assault; and unchecked stories can blur the boundary between allegation and fact. Yet these effects do not establish that media attention created the scene, caused particular crimes, or made audiences behave uniformly. Wiedswang’s central concern is the interaction: reporting enters the world it describes, so its reach makes verification and restraint more important, not silence obligatory.