Who is he, by the way?
My first story as a reporter was a radio documentary for the community radio in Aarhus. It was about the Israeli suppression of the Palestinians.
It was in 1984, and I had just returned from a back-packer trip to the Middle East and Asia during which I met with the Israeli peace movement, visited refugee camps in Gaza and Damascus, and stayed for weeks with Palestinian students at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank.
While I was there, Jewish settlers and fundamentalists massacred students at the nearby Hebron University. Everybody was hurt. All students at Bir Zeit University knew students from Hebron and feared for their life. They began organizing protests – and sent us to Jerusalem for safety.
But we also had an urge to protest.
Suddenly I found myself in a demonstration in Jerusalem with a sign:
”We’re gonna tell it at home”...
The pictures went worldwide on print and TV: I had for a global public made the promise to tell it at home. When I returned to Denmark, I made the radio documentary about Palestine.
Later, I signed up for journalism studies – and here we are.
Before my educational journey, I worked as an unskilled worker, built playgrounds, made props in a theater and was a timber worker and driver at Århus Tømmerhandel, where I became a trustee. It was in the 1970s and we went on strike, and it was good, because I was red on the far left.
My wall came down in 1980 when it dawned on me that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was an oppressive hoax. Then I resigned from the Maoist KAP (Communist Workers' Party, formerly KFML, Communist League of Marxist-Leninists) and have later apologized in both Cambodia and Albania for my mistakes and support for their oppressors.
I have not been a member of any party since.
Fortunately, I found my platform as a publicist and via a critical agenda-setting approach to journalism that was first formulated by Joseph Pulitzer as the editorial policy of The New York World in late 1800, and which the Pulitzer Prize still reminds us about.
Although I never won any Pulitzer Prize, I did receive a very honorable prize in 2010, named after a Danish veteran in Journalism, Carsten Nielsen, from Danish Union of Journalists. The prize was given for the volunteer efforts when founding IMS and Games.
Facts about me:
Traditionally, it is now the time and place to thank my parents; my mother Anette Møller, a nurse’s aide, and my father Erling Møller, a school teacher, for my birth in August 1957. And my son Lynge.
I graduated from the Danish School of Journalism in 1989 after four years of study, including 1½ years at the local newspaper Lemvig Folkeblad.
Since then, I have worked as a freelance journalist at a press bureau, with my own company Tekst&Vision Ltd. and now for some years in Filmbyen, Aarhus.
…and right now, while writing these lines (back in 2008), I am sitting with my legs on the table, the computer in my lap, listening to Aimee Mann in the living room in an apartment in Graven 8, formerly a hippie community, now with valuable equities, while I wait for my 17-year-old son to come back from the movies.
Anyway, I once heard an old saying in a Kung-Fu movie: “The bullcart is slow, but the earth has great patience”.
I hope you the same goes for you …