Útvarp Saga Hacked

The website of the controversial radio station was hacked late last night and creatively vandalised. The station manager has cast aspersions on one media outlet, accusing a journalist there of having accepted a bribe for an invented news story.

MBL reports that late last night, persons unknown hacked into Útvarp Saga’s website. Amongst the acts of vandalism done was to set up a new online opinion poll, bearing the heading “Is [Útvarp Saga station manager] Arnþrúður Karlsdóttir an alcoholic?”.

The act is an obvious reference to some of Útvarp Saga’s more controversial online polls, such as “Do you trust Bubbi Morthens?” – which they posted after the musician responded to the station’s repeated xenophobia and racism by publicly forbidding them from playing any of his songs – as well as “Do you trust Muslims?”

Arnþrúður was quick to take to Facebook over the matter, clarifying that the newest question was not one set up by Útvarp Saga, but was the work of hackers. She said furthermore that the station’s Facebook had been “destroyed”.

“This is the work of some kind of misanthrope, and probably a racist, too,” Arnþrúður posted. “It is also interesting that visir.is made a news story about this at 23:00, at the same time that our Facebook page was destroyed. By all means go into their comments section and ask them about their sources.”

Not content to let matters end there, Vísir reports Arnþrúður took things a step further, accusing Vísir reporters of accepting bribes, posting in the comments section of Vísir:

“This is obviously pre-prepared ‘news’ at Vísir and I challenge the reporter, Bjarki Ármannsson, to tell the rest of us how much he was paid to make this [article] and who paid him.”

Kolbeinn Tumi Daðason, the assistant editor at 365 Media, which oversees Vísir, told reporters the accusations were “hardly worth responding to” but are nonetheless serious, as they can be considered slander. At the same time, he said, the remarks “speak for themselves, as ridiculous as they are.”

Last March, Arnþrúður Karlsdóttir posted a photo of herself to the station’s Facebook page, dressed in what looked like a burqa (but was in fact a ski mask and a black top), along with the question, “Will radio people of the future look like this?”

Last month, she told the radio show Harmageddon that members of ISIS were directly connected to Muslim organisations in Iceland, although she provided no evidence whatsoever to back up the claim. The show has been accused of more generalised xenophobia as well, as they repeatedly call immigrants under suspicion as having a negative effect on Iceland’s economy and culture.

Útvarp Saga has since taken down the poll asking whether or not Arnþrúður is an alcoholic, and replaced it with the question, “Does the government take computer crimes seriously enough?”