Never let facts get in the way of framing
Did a Jewish woman really get booed at a Palestinian protest she was part of? Unclear. But German media will present the story they want, anyway.
Like reading the ‘Schland for free?
Since Hamas’ searing assault on Israel, I have had to radically reduce my consumption of German news on the issue. That’s not good for a person who covers the place he lives in and also personally likes staying informed about. Yet German media, almost across the board, are so morally compromised when it comes to Israel that you have to start treating them like your proverbial uncle on Facebook. I have muted or unfollowed several outlets in the last weeks, as the country that likes to tout its “debate culture” has rapidly lost its collective mind.
Bild is, of course, only the most obvious threat to critical thought. Basically anyone who has a bad word to say about Israel is a “Jew hater.” Par for the course, one might reasonably argue, but non-tabloid dailies are also running with mere speculation and conjecture.
A slightly less obtuse outlet, Focus, has a new op-ed out asking in its headline, “The Jews or the angry Arabs: We have to decide who we want to keep.” Die Zeit, a left-leaning weekly that I have long respected for at least occasionally poking at the banality of consensus, has a security policy reporter explaining how great a job Israel is doing at avoiding killing civilians in Gaza.
To the extent that position is defensible, it’s the job of an IDF spokesperson to present it and a reporter’s job to quote it, and give context, not pass along the message himself. (I can’t believe I even have to clarify that.)
Then there are the public media, which people living in Germany pay a pretty pfennig for. They aren’t so much news anymore as instruction guides for how to think. Here, Deutschlandfunk wants you to know that of course you can criticize Israel, and this is the correct way of doing so:
Its culture channel feels the need to remind followers of what “antisemitism” even is. I say, if history’s World Champions of Jew Hating need to run to the dictionary to know that, it does not speak well of 80 years of post-war Aufarbeitung. Then again, Germans know very little about Jewish life.
Apparently it is necessary, however, and the folks who need it most is Deutschlandfunk itself. As just about every other German outlet, and many international ones, too, DLF went big on the huge rise in antisemitic incidents. The post highlights three examples: The first remains unsolved, the second is wildly vague, and the third is about Israeli flags. Topping it off is “commentary” from the outlet’s former Israel correspondent, now based in Berlin. Because his opinion clearly means something.
None of this is particularly new or surprising, and it just follows the political rhetoric these media are covering. Otherwise respectable lawmakers from otherwise respectable parties have floated insane policy ideas that would thrill the far-right AfD, such as limits on how many immigrants can live where. (No, Wolfgang Kubicki is not referring to “good immigrants” like me.) Long-awaited naturalization reform is once again on ice. Germany’s health minister, the Social Democrat Karl Lauterbach, has embraced the racist rants of a British nationalist, who argues that Hamas is worse than the Nazis.
I could keep going, but I fear I have depressed you all, so let me pause with a bit of good news. There are some commendable aspects of German media. First of all, it exists. Even small towns and cities can have two or three local newspapers. There are several at the national level. Public media are extensive and well-funded, which help ensure at least a baseline exposure to news and information, and public literacy. Government institutions are fairly accessible, make information available, and will answer your questions. Sure it’s all boilerplate, but it’s better than stonewalling; the clever journalist can appropriately contextualize that boilerplate to reveal something more.
Admittedly, that is all a pretty low bar. It doesn’t get much higher. German media, especially in the politics beat, are still too much a chummy, old boys club. Official news releases, foremost from police, are often treated as neutral fact and simply reprinted. Minority and outside voices get shortchanged. Marginalized groups are regularly talked about and not to. Quote approval is SOP, which means just about every quote you read in a German newspaper has been signed off on by the person who said it. In extreme cases, the source interferes with the editorial process itself, dictating what can and cannot be published.
As in so many other aspects of German public life, consensus über alles.
Despite the aforementioned accessibility, even those charged with handling press can come off as amateurs, showing little understanding for how news gets made. I’ve lost count of how many times I have had to explain, step-by-step, what I’m after. No, I won’t run our conversation as an entire interview. Yes, I will only take a few quotes. No, you will not be the only voice in the story. Yes, this is all on the record, by default.
I’m not an investigative journalist, so it’s not like I’m asking for anything career-ending. It’s more about lack of trust and desire to control, often rooted in a general suspicion of a reporter’s intentions. Some sources hesitate to stand by even minor details or basic facts out of fear of what I will do with them. Often when I send a source a story I’ve written after it’s been published (for which I tell them upfront they cannot approve quotes, unless I need factual clarification of an issue), the most common response is a sense of relief and pleasant surprise that I was so fair. Like, what else?
That is less to my credit than a reflection of a climate of gotcha-journalism that persists in Germany — a sensationalist style that largely went out of fashion in the United States in the Hard Copy 1990s. Anyone can get a scoop with a hidden camera or false pretenses. That’s not journalism; it’s entrapment.
Most peculiar is the blurred line between news and opinion. Reporters double as commentators, including on their own beats. I’ve got plenty of complaints about U.S. media, but when a NYT journalist goes on “The Daily,” she talks about what she knows. When a Zeit journalist goes on “Was Jetzt,” she talks about what she thinks. If a story summary in a newsletter includes a particular opinion, the source of that opinion might not be whom the reporter talked to, but the reporter himself. I tend to scroll past these links, because who cares?
As Bernard Cohen famously observed in 1963: “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” That is the foundation of agenda-setting theory, and it happens all the time in varying degrees of severity and intent. To some extent, agenda-setting is unavoidable, as merely choosing what story to cover from the get-go builds the frame that determines what we see and what we don’t. That’s just what news organizations do.
Let’s take a recent, less benign example. An award-winning author wrote an op-ed in Die Zeit defending the importance of Palestinian rights and the just cause of criticizing Israel, but ultimately expresses dismay at how little sympathy this position has shown for Israeli suffering. While part of the essay is thoughtful, he makes no issue of pro-Israel events’ corresponding lack of sympathy for Palestinian suffering. He also seems to have conveniently missed all the outrage at Russia’s bombing of Ukrainian cities and the Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan, as he tries to demarcate a double standard among activists.
He bases his case largely on a single, pro-Palestinian protest in Berlin that he didn’t witness himself, but heard about on Deutschlandfunk. Among the second-hand information he passes along is a claim that the crowd booed a woman representing an anti-Zionist Jewish organization that helped organize the protest. This seemed strange to me, and I wanted to listen to the report for myself. But I couldn’t at first, since the article did not link to it or give any other specifics so I could find it on my own.
Fortunately, the author’s publicist was kind enough to send me the link (min. 15:30). The protest in question was a big one on Nov. 4, which police say 8,500 people attended; organizers, and photos, suggest it was bigger. The report seems to check the box of a job well done: It focuses on the “other side”; it lets voices from that side speak for themselves; and it presents the various issues of the particular story. A closer listen — and I have a few times now — reveals the wild claims and unattributed opinion dressed up as harmless observations. The program host introduces the report by highlighting the “multiple” criminal charges resulting from the event even as she has to acknowledge that it was “overwhelmingly peaceful.”
A protest organizer does her cause no favors by calling Hamas’ attack on Israel merely “questionable,” because a single statement balloons into “no speaker came out with a clear condemnation of the massacre.” More accurate: No speaker to whom the reporter spoke and depending on the questions he asked. We, as listeners, just don’t know and only have his perspective for understanding the full picture. The DLF reporter then disparages the protest leaders, highlighting how some of the speakers were “shouting,” as if that is something remarkable at a protest.
Then we get into doublespeak territory. German media usually love the word “bunt” — literally, “colorful” and meant in the sense of diversity. You’ll see it attached, in a positive and supportive sense, to coverage of counter-demonstrations confronting the AfD or neo-Nazis, or queer community events like Christopher Street Day. Here, when criticizing Israeli policy, “bunt” becomes an insult and a means of discrediting protesters and their views.
“Many here seem like they just came out of clubs,” the reporter observes, describing one person he speaks with as a “young, blond woman with a nose piercing.”
Then the incident in question: Was a Jewish woman really booed at the protest, as the reporter claims happened when she was announced to the crowd? I’ve listened back multiple times and all I hear are general whistles and hollers you would expect from several thousand people at a protest. There is even some applause to note. Moreover, it is unclear if these sounds running under the narration are from the moment in question or just non-specific atmospherics from the day.
The DLF report ends with an incredible claim: “A large portion of protesters apparently don’t want any Jews here — even when they chant, ‘free Palestine.’”
The italics are mine because “apparently” is doing enough heavy lifting here it could break the word. Then, without any attribution to this claim beyond the reporter’s own musings, we’re back in the studio with the program host. That is, as they say, how the wurst gets made.
The Jewish organization has not responded to my request to confirm the alleged booing. Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe something in-between. Until further information comes to light, I will stick with Carl Sagan’s sage advice:
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
This is such a helpful analysis of the difference between US and German media and after wondering why things seemed a bit ‘off’ to me listening to German radio/reading online as a US immigrant, now I get it!
On sunday 14th November, a big pro-palestinian demonstration was held in Frankfurt Main in front of the city hall (where since weeks an israel-flag is being raised!), organized by the Islamic Community of the state of Hesse. One of the speakers was the german-Israeli publisher and peace activist Abraham Melzer, who for his speech received the longest applause by the mostly muslim participants (about 2000 people).