My government, your regime - or the other way round if you insist

In the past year, issues of freedom of the press have been discussed on several occasions, most recently in connection with the events in Ukraine.

A news anchor of Russia's RT resigned on TV during a broadcast in protest of the Russian position, and the obvious "new cold war" argument has been brandished.

Germany's Zeit Online has an article up called "Media war: our values, your propaganda" (in German) that gives an overview of the new-ish media players from Russia, China and other countries. It is a decent read.

As hesitant and slow readers of German news, what first caught our eyes years ago was the use of "government" versus "regime" in headlines.

German standard dictionary Duden has "Regime" flagged as generally derogatory, which makes it fairly clear that any scribbles about a legitimate government should not use "Regime" while claiming to be anywhere close to objective journalism.

In English, though, there are other uses of "regime", for instance, tax regime, that could be interpreted as making the use of "regime" for "government" slightly less of a propaganda term.

Unfortunately for the Germans, quite a few English terms do cast their meaning over existing German words, so a lazy editor at, for example, Der Spiegel (one of the worst offenders regularly calling the Russian government "the Russian Regime", or "Putin-Regime", can claim the benefit of doubt, a standard propaganda device in itself.After only a few instances, we were tempted to stop reading articles that had "regime" in the headline. There is no way you get any objective information out of such an article. But we continue to read them, for one because we want to stay open, and because we like crazy news.

Call it our news vice.

[Update 2/13/2016] Added "Duden" definition, English use and "languages in contact" blurb.