This week, two individuals became the focus of global celebration following an unlikely and joyous confluence of circumstances.
The viral story went that two elderly men escaped their care facility to attend a metal festival in northern Germany (or, as one headline put it: “Elderly Men Escape Retirement Home to Go RAGE!!”).
Except they weren’t, and they didn’t.
The two men, as it turns out, are 58 and 59 years old and had escaped “a home for people with mental health issues,” according to the Associated Press, before traveling to Wacken, a city roughly 50 miles north of Hamburg. They arrived there at the same time that the Wacken Open Air music festival — referred to as the world’s largest for metal — was happening.
If they can’t or won’t get the facts straight on a harmless little story like this then imagine what kind of fairy tale twisting must be going with the more politicized stuff.
While President Donald Trump held his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday he brought up one of his favorite themes: “Fake news” and malicious journalists who are ought to get him.
There were some boos in the crowd following this. No big surprise here. But responsible journalists at Germany’s Staatsfunk channel ARD, concerned that these boos might not be as audible on their recording as they “ought” to be, tweaked the audio to make the boos louder.
The outrage in Germany hielt sich in Grenzen (was limited) when this came out, of course, but a few German journalists were nevertheless less than impressed with the ARD’s methods. “You’ve clearly overstepped the limits for a news broadcast,” wrote one journalist. “And it’s hard to imagine that you would have done the same should there have been applause.”
„Die @tagesschau hilft ein bisschen nach, damit Buh-Rufe gegen Trump lauter und deutlicher zu hören sind. Klare Grenzüberschreitung bei einer Nachrichtensendung, lieber @KaiGniffke. Und schwer vorstellbar, dass Sie dasselbe bei Applaus getan hätten“, schreibt Reichelt.
Adolf Hitler ‘Escaped Germany And Fled To Colombia’ Claims Report In Declassified CIA Document
And he joined forces with Bigfoot, like I said, and got help from the Reptilians, too, to conspire to assaisnate JFK. After which they faked the moon landing along with the Iluminati and planned the attacks on 9/11 as an inside job. But before that they released the Hitler diaries over there at the the Stern.
SS-Mann berichtete Agenten, Hitler habe als Adolf Schüttelmayer in Kolumbien gelebt.
It’s not the Germany I live in. Germans don’t resist fake news, they roll around in it like pigs in the mud. Only they pretend their news is not fake. Their fake news doesn’t stink, in other words. And their fake news is different than our fake news, of course. Maybe that’s why they can pretend it isn’t fake: German fake news is generated by the government broadcasters and funded by taxation for which the viewers have no representation.
Here is a little example recently to give you an idea of what I mean. If 98 percent negative reporting about Donald Trump done by a state-run broadcasting monopoly isn’t fake news I don’t know what is. Germans would be skeptical about 98 percent negative reporting on Hitler. Nobody here bats an eye about this, however. What is there to resist, right?
More regulation of social media, less news consumption from alternative sources and no Fox News.
German media were too uncritical in their coverage of the 2015 refugee crisis, giving Angela Merkel’s open-door policy a free pass and failing to represent the legitimate concerns of ordinary people alarmed by the influx, a new study has found...
It said newspapers made no attempt to differentiate between rightwing radicals and ordinary people who were left feeling politically insecure or marginalized by the refugee influx. Instead of critical reporting, journalists had merely “adopted the viewpoint and also the slogans of the political elite…”
The report said Willkommenskultur became a kind of “magic word” used by certain sections of the media to turn ordinary people into good Samaritans and encourage them to carry out acts of kindness towards newcomers…
A recent poll by the University of Mainz, cited in the study, found that 55 per cent of those asked felt “systematically lied to by the media.” Some 26 per cent agreed with the statement that “the media and politicians work hand in hand to manipulate public opinion.”
War die nachrichtliche Berichterstattung über die Flüchtlingskrise zu einseitig?
Forget about the lying press. Now some German media have taken it to a new level and publish their news reports using a secret code. Everybody here knows the code, however, so it’s not much of a secret. But still.
Here’s an example: 250 “people” obstruct a police operation in Duisburg. The cops in Duisburg wanted to check the papers of some guy involved in a traffic violation. The situation escalated, however, ending up with a gang of 250 “people” assembling and interfering with this police action.
Let me decode that for you: Germans don’t assemble in groups like that to interfere with cops investigating some traffic violation. Ergo, other people who now live in Germany do. Not one word can be found in that article indicating that, of course, but your everyday Germans on the street have become such experienced code breakers that they know the deal as soon as they read the headline. Nobody’s lying though, see?
Etwa 250 Menschen haben der Polizei zufolge eine Verkehrskontrolle gestört.
Because, well, that would be too unpleasant for the public being made to do the broadcaster’s forced funding to have to face.
Germany’s state-run television channel ARD recently decided not to air a documentary it had itself commissioned concerning the latest outbreak of antisemitism in Europe and the Middle East because the people doing the film apparently did this job much too well (after enough noise was made about this decision the ARD had to broadcast it anyway).
This could trouble viewers in a country where at least 40% of its citizens hold anti-Israel, antisemitic views. Or so the reasoning must be. ARD documentaries propagating negative views about Israel get aired here all the time, however. This having to do with balanced journalism or something. Or so the reasoning must be.
Anti-Zionism is not a legitimate political position, but rather a movement against the Jewish and democratic state. It is Antisemitism 2.0.
PS: Meanwhile… The latest boycott Israel campaign from BDS seems to be making great strides forward here in Berlin. It is unclear at this point whether the ARD will be commissioning a documentary about this campaign or not.
German told their trust in newspapers soars to record level.
After being told that a total of 55.7 percent of respondents to a study said they trust the print press, a total of 55.7 percent of respondents to the study said they trust the print press, a drastic rise on the 45.7 percent of respondents who gave that response in 2015, they were told, and the highest level of trust since the survey was first conducted in 2000, somebody told them, too. Or so I’ve been told.
Noch nie seit über 15 Jahren war das Vertrauen in die Presse so hoch wie heute. Den deutschen Medien ist es gelungen, das in sie gesetzte Vertrauen zu stärken und weiter auszubauen.
Frightened by unsubstantiated fake news reports that US-Amerika‘s president has turned the place into an alternative history (alternative fact history?) horror-land run in part by their creepy grandparents, German vacationers are staying away in droves.
Almost half of Germans with an interest in traveling to the U.S. won’t do so now because they feel unwelcome or don’t want to endorse President Donald Trump.
About 46 percent of Germans who would like to visit the U.S. “in principle” have changed their views on that destination since Trump took office and won’t travel there as a result, according to a survey by GfK SE published in travel-industry magazine fvw.
That’s what the English term fake news has in Germany. And that’s why it just won Anglicism of the year 2016 (that’s bigger than the Oscars over here, folks).
Fake (pronounced “fack” as in Fack ju Göhte) and news (pronounced “noose”) is more than the sum of its parts. Much more. It fills a gap in German vocabulary that would otherwise not be filled. That is, unless you filled this gap with fake German news, a term for which there is no proper German term. This is because all the news here is fake, always has been (state-run TV, know what I’m saying?). But it’s all good clean fun and nobody gets hurt feelings because Germany is a benevolent all-intrusive kinda state, right? Not always has been, but still.
„Fake News“ wird im Englischen den Angaben zufolge etwa seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts verwendet: Damals seien bewusste Falschmeldungen in Zeitungen ab und an so bezeichnet worden.
