Updated: May 4, 2021
The Corona crisis is turning journalists into court reporters.
by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
I published this text on Facebook on March 29, 2020, shortly after the start of Germany’s first lockdown. The response was overwhelming: it reached 1.3 million readers, tens of thousands shared it, several magazines reprinted it, and a doctor read it on YouTube.
I have been working as a science journalist for over 35 years, with a focus on medicine. I was always able to stand by what I did for a living. However, if what the mass media are delivering almost entirely in the Corona crisis still passes for “journalism,” then I don’t want anything to do with it or anything at all. If what they sell as “science” and pass on undigested to their target groups is entirely science, then I will quickly vacate my area of work.
With sheer horror and helpless anger, I follow the unworthy activities of seasoned professional colleagues: from the editor at the news magazine to the “Tagesthemen” and “Heute” presenter to the press agency employee, to the radio chatterbox, to the social media copywriter, to the talk show Host.
They bring official horror figures to the people unfiltered, without questioning how they come about in the first place, how they are evaluated, what they mean, and what about other numbers. They make hastily approved, inadequately verified tests important and necessary without shedding light on what they actually measure, what follows from them and what does not, what the error rate is, and who benefits from their mass use. They are shocking people with the latest Corona exit, the very latest, even more, hair-raising death statistics, without even investigating in a single case WHAT those affected actually died from.
They are participating in state scaremongering by not distinguishing between contamination, infection, and disease, by staring at the day’s reproduction rate as if it said anything about the health of the nation. They do not report today’s reassuringly few infections and deaths but rather the cumulative, steadily increasing numbers from the beginning of the pandemic. Anyone who dies WITH the virus always dies BECAUSE of it? Someone who short-circuits their readers/viewers like that might as well be telling them that water is a super-killer because an H2O test on every corpse is guaranteed to come back positive.
Measuring this “pandemic of the century” against previous flu waves and WHO false alarms does not occur in such a journal. She speculates wildly about celebrities like Merkel and Johnson being infected with corona as soon as they sneeze, cough, and have a fever – every banal cold can now produce “breaking news”; we’ve already gotten that far. Every dead person died from the killer germ as long as his death still raises questions. (“Klaus Wowereit’s partner died – infection with coronavirus?”, t-online, March 29, 2020.)
Journalists are madly vying with one another for the scariest snapshot, the most heartbreaking Corona tragedy, and the most alarming expert statement. As if it were a matter of course, they aid in suppressing dissenting opinions. Without hesitation, they participate in the blanket denigration and silencing of protest as a conspiracy theory.
Dear colleagues, are you still in your right mind? What you deliver almost as a whole looks more like submissive applications to the central organ of the Coronist Unity Party of Germany. Hardly any of you dare to scratch the pillar saints of the Robert Koch Institute and the Charité.
Barely anyone listens to the well-founded, factual concerns of many doctors and scientists who are alienated and even horrified by the Corona hype – and if they do, you apparently lack the courage to make a big splash about what you have heard. Hardly anyone is fighting with them against the rampant censorship on social media under the guise of the crusade against fake news. Nobody is surprised why free citizens have to allow themselves to be bullied like insane people just because they belong to a “risk group” – as if they cannot take care of themselves. Life is always life-threatening, especially at the end of your life.
Which health risks does Grandpa want to accept or avoid? Shouldn’t that be left up to him, such as smoking and alcohol consumption, lack of exercise, and poor quality nutrition? No journalist asks why we suddenly have to act differently than with previous flu waves, which reliably came and went, causing millions of infections and tens of thousands of deaths every year without a rooster crowing. Nobody seems to notice that the supposed “solution” is already far worse than the problem. Nobody wants to know why calls for increased hygiene, special caution, and consideration were not done in the same way as before 2020. Nobody investigates who actually gave the bloody medical laymen at the federal government’s cabinet table all the apocalyptic information and situation analyses that gave them “no alternative” to emergency action “make appear; how many and which lobbyists they spoke to about what before and during the crisis.
Hardly anyone dares to put even the shyest question mark behind any infection protection measure. Nobody cares whether it could benefit anyone if the crisis causes as much mass panic as possible and drags on. Nobody has the uneasy feeling that they are allowing themselves to be exploited – as a henchman in a thriller whose story unfolds with the precision of clockwork, according to a script that was possibly already written before Wuhan. And…and…und …
Instead, we are witnessing herd journalism, whose sheep are huddled together under the pressure of the Corona crisis and believe they are one with governments, authorities, and the people. “We stay at home,” they write on the top of the television screens. Who is we”? Who came up with this idea, which borrows eerily from the “Volksgemeinschaft” of the Third Reich?
How a profession that is supposed to control the powerful as an independent, critical, unbiased fourth power can succumb to the same collective hysteria as its audience just as quickly and almost unanimously and give in to court reporting, government propaganda, and expert-based idolization of the holy cow of science: that is incomprehensible to me, it disgusts me, I’ve had enough of it, I distance myself from this unworthy performance full of shame. Instead of defending fundamental rights against constitutional sabotage by a government in a supposed state of emergency, acting as advocates for freedom, journalists often act as prosecutors against dissenters.
Truthfulness and careful research; Protecting the honor and respecting the dignity of people – including those who hold different opinions; cross-checking every source of information, no matter how credible it may seem at first glance; Avoiding sensational representations that could arouse excessive hopes or fears: all of this is one of the top priorities of any press code.
Almost a quarter of a year after the start of the pseudo-pandemic, no one seems to have survived the attack of SARS-Cov-2, at least not in the infected brains of those to whom it was supposed to apply. Where is the Press Council currently sleeping? In addition to the parliamentary opposition that has fallen asleep?
At least one person still dares to put his finger in the gaping wound: the German media scientist Otfried Jarren, professor at the Institute for Communication Science and Media Research at the University of Zurich and President of the Federal Media Commission in Switzerland until the end of 2018. In the press service epd medien, he sharply criticizes public television.
For weeks, the same experts and politicians have been appearing as crisis managers, says Jarren. In this way, television stages threats and executive power at the same time – and practices “system journalism.” Critics are left out. He particularly noticed the Norddeutscher Rundfunk because of its “special form of court reporting.”
“The editors-in-chief have abdicated,” concludes Jarren. In the reporting he misses “all the distinctions that would have to be made and asked about: Who has what expertise? Who appears in what role?” In addition, mostly individual statements are sent; there is no real debate between experts who could introduce opposing viewpoints and aspects.
At least the media journalist Andrej Reisin is unpleasantly struck by how uniform the reporting on the coronavirus is. In the Übermedien portal, he criticizes that even in times of crisis, it is not the job of the media to play the extended arm of the government and stage campaigns like “We against the virus,” as the “Tagesschau” did on social media.
On Deutschlandfunk, media journalist Vera Linß called for greater focus on the issues of surveillance and data protection in connection with the fight against the coronavirus. Linß also criticizes the fact that many journalists currently seem to feel obliged to convey their government’s crisis strategy largely uncritically – “as a kind of service journalism.”
“Many media people have lost the critical distance from pandemic policy,” complained the editor-in-chief of Stern in an editorial at the beginning of June. Why did it take the man several months before he finally noticed this?
It has been 87 years since journalists became “public servants” in Germany. Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels considered an explicit “editor law” necessary for this. In the Corona crisis, as before, with topics such as compulsory measles vaccinations or the right to exist for alternative practitioners and homeopaths, it is constantly turning out that the media of the 21st century is obviously making its mark even without the pressure of paragraphs. The scissors in the head have always been the sharpest.
Harald Wiesendanger
Addendum (March 31): Encouraged by the enormous response to this article, I offered it to four print media that I would have thought would be most likely to take it on Frankfurter Rundschau, taz, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit. Reactions? Zero. Not even rejections. Just silence.
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