The dark side of Germany's love of international news

Why would anybody in their right mind claim there is a dark side of Germany's love of international news?

First of all, who says the author of this blog possesses if in "a right mind"?

See, that was easy. Now, the claim, or the hypothesis - using 'hypothesis' here to be able to backpedal in case the argument doesn't pan out further down - is based on spending too much time at the computer, reading at least five big German daily news websites a day plus the odd extra news site, some Bild Zeitung, some Brit news, some US news, some RT, a bunch of specialized online media sites on a whim...but no (zero, zilch, nada) German television. German TV is at least 100 times as big as, say RTE, but with less news value. The one exception in 2014 might have been "the Snowden interview" but that's a separate story.

Please don't be overwhelmed by the enumeration because the amount of news we gobble up has, I'm afraid, nothing to do with our ability to analyze what we take in.

German news has a huge proportion of international news. The big national sites/papers like Frankfurter Allgemeine, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Die Welt, Sueddeutsche Zeitung come across much like the old International Herald Tribune or the BBC World Service than a "national" paper.

Germany's economy is tremendously export oriented, and the country's citizens were the vacation travel champions of the world until the Chinese overtook them.Walk up to any stranger in any corner of the world and ask: are you German or Chinese?** If the answer is neither, they are likely Canadian.***

It is natural that German news reflects this interest, no?

Yes, it is, but if you look deeper, you can, we believe, tease out a couple of things. Accidents, disaster news, and lifestyle news - including politics, lifestyle news in pinstripes and/or with guns - seem to come easier when they happen in a foreign country.

Things as simple as the crash of a small plane (one or two people) tend to get very wide coverage if that plane goes down, say in the US. A flight training accident in Germany, similar in nature, got very little coverage.
Full names of suspects of crimes are reported when the event is outside of Germany, where in Germany, privacy laws call for their abbreviation unless it is a public figure.

Like in other countries, many important initial news come from online media and are picked up by the big ones but generally not deepened. You can say the same is true in other countries, and it is. But German online publications in economic and complex socio-political issues appear to often be alone on a topic, the bulk of big journalism focusing rather on anti police riots in the US than digging deeper into important German issues.

Don't get us wrong. You get a lot of domestic news, but is often remains disjointed and someone often wants to make money off of them. Consumer protection in Germany is not bad, but there is oddly less of it - for free - than in the US. Some areas of importance, like legal advice, have been cordoned off, so to speak, and there is a cease & desist industry that is frightful to say the least.

Information around here often appears to be "siloed", packaged by specialist area, and carefully watched over by lawyers prepared to go after publishers.

In the recent debate around the Pegida "anti-islamization" movement, demonstrators habitually called the German mainstream media "liars". And they used an old term "Lügenpresse" (lying papers) for it, which was used widely in the early 1900s around WWI and then by the Nazis on their way up.

Of course, protesters got slapped with "Nazi speech", and some of their slogans make this more understandable. Yet, there can be no doubt that German TV is very much influenced by politics -- they have politicians on their boards, their funds must be signed off on by state legislatures, the committee establishing funding recommendations is nominated unanimously by the state governors -- and that freedom of opinion does not necessarily mean freedom of speech.

To their credit, some mainstream media workers said, well, there is a point there, we are doing a lot of OpEd, commentary style stuff, maybe that is to the detriment of factual reporting.

So, if you will, this post simply extends this criticism from within by suggesting that the easy, carefree, lawsuit free international reporting might contribute to the lower emphasis on in depth, connect dots and stand up for you opinion domestic reporting.

An outstanding example of "easy reading" on a foreign subject while the same one is hardly ever mentioned in a domestic setting is that of political dynasties. German media write a lot about the Bush and Clinton "dynasties" and hardly ever mention the many children of high ranking German officials in elected office or the "lifetime" jobs in the German civil service.
As we write this, there are two children of former (less than a generation ago) federal secretaries/state governors in Ms. Merkels federal government. There are many more at the state level, yet no mention of dynasties.

The times when international news came almost exclusively via national media are over, demonstrated in part by vociferous attacks on foreign media outlets like Russian RT. RT may not be a stalwart of independent journalism, but - seriously - that label does not apply to Germany's Bild Zeitung or others either.

Follow the herd seems, to us, a big part of it. In the pack of reporters, you are fairly safe. The lock step reporting on many topics in the German media on recent topics like Russia, the Ukraine, the Middle East has been criticized as one sided. It may be a good expression of that pack mentality, which we tend to see on many subjects in the US media, too.
Too much celeb news, too much random lifestyle news, too many royals, well...

Exceptions confirm the rule, of course.

** Physical appearance no longer counts.
*** Northern Canadians (Canadians) as well as southern Canadians (US and Mexican).