Tag Archives: Newspapers

If You Didn’t Read It Here It Didn’t Happen

November 1, 2019 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Go Neues Deutschland. There are not a lot of East Berlin newspapers out there that have the backbone to call the fall of the Berlin Wall fake news.

ND

Communist newspapers? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

Wolfgang Hübner returns from the archives of the Neues Deutschland newspaper clutching a rare treasure: a thick binder containing one of the biggest misses in journalistic history.

Mr Hübner has unearthed the edition of Friday, November 10 1989, the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is the most consequential moment of the decade, yet that day’s ND — the official organ of the Socialist party of East Germany, boasting a circulation of more than 1m — contains not a word on the event.

“Lots of traffic at the border crossing.”

If It’s Not In Der Spiegel, It Didn’t Happen

December 20, 2018 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Unfortunately, that’s also the case even when it is in Der Spiegel.

Spiegel

And here y’all thought that fake news was fake.

Award-winning journalist Claas Relotius wrote fake news, German magazine Der Spiegel says.

An award-winning journalist who worked for Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s leading news outlets, has left the weekly magazine after evidence emerged that he committed journalistic fraud “on a grand scale” over a number of years, the publication said Wednesday…

Spiegel’s revelations echoed past instances of journalistic fraud by reporters elsewhere, including Jayson Blair of The New York Times, Christopher Newton of The Associated Press and Janet Cooke, whose 1980 piece about a child addicted to heroin won The Washington Post writer a Pulitzer Prize before it was exposed as untrue.

Er hat nach Meinung der Jury des Deutschen Reporterpreises 2018 wieder die beste Reportage des Jahres geschrieben, über einen syrischen Jungen diesmal, der im Glauben lebt, durch einen Kinderstreich den Bürgerkrieg im Land mit ausgelöst zu haben. Die Juroren würdigen einen Text “von beispielloser Leichtigkeit, Dichte und Relevanz, der nie offenlässt, auf welchen Quellen er basiert.”

How Tasteless

October 31, 2018 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

How could British newspapers report such things? In this way, I mean. As if they really happened. Which, of course, they did. But still.

Rape

If a German newspaper printed this it would be… Well, it wouldn’t be a German newspaper

Five Afghan asylum seekers are arrested for allegedly raping a girl, 15, in Germany – as country is rocked by sex attack on student, 18, ‘by Syrian migrants’

If it’s not in the German news, it didn’t happen.

All Good Clean Fun, Right?

May 17, 2018 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Nothing at all, I dunno, creepy or anything here.

Eurovision

Germany’s new anti-Semitism commissioner says a leading newspaper crossed a “red line” with a caricature of Benjamin Netanyahu portraying the Israeli Prime Minister with oversized lips, ears and nose.

Felix Klein, who was appointed this year amid concerns over rising anti-Semitism, told the Bild newspaper on Thursday that Tuesday’s cartoon in Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung* in the aftermath of the U.S. decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem recalled “the intolerable depictions of Nazi propaganda.”

The drawing depicts Netanyahu dressed as Israeli singer Netta Barzilai, who won this year’s Eurovision song contest. The heart that forms the “v” in Eurovision is replaced with a Star of David and Netanyahu is hoisting a missile in his hand, saying “next year in Jerusalem.”

Sueddeutsche Zeitung has apologized for the caricature.

* The editorial stance of the newspaper is liberal and generally of center-left.

German Of The Day: Certainly Not Here

September 14, 2017 By in Helplessness, Higher Education, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Not in this English newspaper.

Sun

It’s kind of German, I guess. But it’s certainly not very kind to the German language.

Es ist Zeit für die Erwachsenen, Angela Merkel und Emmanuel Macron, die Verhandlungsführer durch den Hals zu ergreifen und Sie zu stoppen verschwenden Zeit mit Punkt-Scoring. Das ist zu wichtig.

A pro-Brexit editorial written in German has a problem: It’s literally gibberish.

All The Secret Code That’s Fit To Print

June 26, 2017 By in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hideology, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

250

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.

German Of The Day: Verpufft

April 14, 2017 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

That means fizzled out.

Schulz

Scientists recently hired to find traces of the mythical “Schulz Effect” in Germany are said to be busy preparing their resumes for new employment opportunities as the search for the mysterious, ethereal force has proven to be much more difficult than originally expected.

Meanwhile, German newspapers (ARD-Deutschlandtrend) are reporting that Martin Schulz’ popularity has dropped significantly behind that of his opponent Angela Merkel and even behind that of German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel, the previous SPD loser candidate he was brought here from Brussels to replace.

Verpufft or not, let us continue to wish these scientists all the best for the future because, after all, science marches on. Or in the words of Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.“

Is Bild Without Bild Still Bild?

September 9, 2015 By in Hard Facts, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humility Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Germany’s best-selling newspaper has removed all pictures from its print edition and website in response to complaints about its decision to publish images of the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned trying to reach Greece.

Bild

The decision to remove pictures in print and online comes less than a week after the newspaper dedicated its whole back page to the distressing image of Alan lying face down on the beach in Bodrum, surrounded by a black background and a plea for action from Europe.

Berlin Is Already Over And Nobody Here Had The Decency To Tell Me

March 10, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, High Art, Higher Education, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Or at least that’s what one New York Times journalist had to report – after clearly having run into way too many Americans here. And how could that not spell trouble?

Berlin

The Berlin backlash had to happen sooner or later. No city could be so consistently lauded to the skies for its creative edge, elegant shabbiness, and 24-hour nightlife without eventually coming down with a hard bump. And the bump does seem to have arrived.

…On the international front, the city’s social scene is also getting increasingly Anglophone.

Erschwerend kam hinzu, dass der offenbar aus New York stammende New-York-Times-Autor im Berghain wie auch überall sonst in Berlin ausschließlich auf andere aus New York stammende Menschen gestoßen ist, was die Bedeutung der einstigen Hipsterhochburg für ihn abschließend ruiniert hat; getreu der von dem ebenfalls aus New York stammenden Gegenwartsanalytiker Groucho Marx aufgestellten Maxime, dass er kein Mitglied in einem Club sein möchte, der ihn aufnehmen würde.

An Anti-Semitic Caricature?

February 26, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, History, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

In Germany? Today? No way.

Zuckerberg

Or way?

Octo

Hard to say.

Uh. German anti-Facebook technophobia is one thing, but like what on earth were they thinking (or drinking?) over there at the Süddeutsche Zeitung when they put out this one?

“If anyone has any doubts about the anti-Semitic dimension of the cartoon, we can point to Mark Zuckerberg’s very prominent nose, which is not the case in real life.”