General Discussion

Much of the electronic media here is quasi government owned, though not socialist style. No TACC or anything like that, although the two main quasi dictatorships, Hungary and Russia do muzzle their press when it comes to permitting anything critical of their own governments—i.e. they don’t. Sometimes semi-official directives are issued, like the time the Belgian press was forbidden from reporting that violent crimes were committed by Moroccan immigrants. The intent was to reduce discrimination against them, but the Belgians, not being idiots, knew exactly what was only going on when the crimes were reported with no mention of who committed them. They cynically said, “it was those Swedish immigrants again (there are none). “ Interestingly, Murdoch tried to organize a Fox Germany cable TV station, and faltered when running up against Germany’s anti-Nazi laws, probably the most restrictive laws on fully free speech still on the books in Europe. They gave up.

Otherwise, government-owned electronic press, like the BBC, AFP, the main German channels ARD and ZDF, enjoy near total press freedom as long as they attempt to remain pretty much objective. There is no government printed press. That died with socialist-run governments here. Therefore, there is a far greater range of slanting in the print press, where the full range exists in most countries.

The problem here, as I see it, is that the European correspondents don’t dig deeper than what they see on the surface. They don’t get the humor of Colbert or Kimmel (for years, my wife didn’t either), so it was hard for them to grasp how much their loss traumatized so much of our nation. They are sometimes understaffed, and if they don’t look for the significance of people like Pritzker, Schiff, Crockett, they will never understand how important they are. I don’t even know one European who knows the name Rachel Maddow.

They don’t look, and so they don’t see. I’m not the only one to notice this. The same complaint was expressed, and far more forcefully, by a German friend who was Moscow station chief for the WDR (local western German radio and TV news). He took his job seriously, learned Russian, traveled all over, from the Ukrainian border to Kamchatka. He lamented that many of his German colleagues there were too content to parrot other people’s reporting, and not get out and dig for the stories themselves. So the problem here is not with higher-ups telling journalists what to report, but rather the journalists, themselves, being too quick to decide that what is most important is that which requires the least work.

One time, when I was in NYC, I was stopped by a German TV crew for a random American “man-on-the-street” interview. I said sure, OK, and started speaking German to them. They said what I said was fascinating, but they couldn’t use my interview. I asked why not? They said their prescribed formula assumed that Americans are never able to speak German, and that I didn’t fit their narrative. It’s a far more subtle way to slant their news. I’m as American as anyone else on the street, but I’m too familiar with Germany, so my opinion isn’t newsworthy to Germans—so say the German media, anyway.