Monday, December 22, 2014

[Update] 47% of Germans feel media is biased - media blames Internet

This is one for the Wisdom of the Kraut.*

An astounding 47% of Germans feel that media reporting is biased and guided by politics, reports German weekly DIE ZEIT. The article is in German, but well worth a read.

Of course, as an American, you can say wow, some 40% still think that the media is "generally" independent and objective. Who are these Germans, why would they think that?

And why is the subject of objectivity by and trust in the media worth a poll now, not half a year ago, not six months down the road but now?

The debate has been going on for some time, at times heated, at times barely simmering. So, in our minds, the question of why the poll was done now is beside the point.

If we take a long view, the debate even looks a bit stale because the "lying media" has been an epithet for as long as we dared to check, which includes the time before the internet.

Which brings us to the blame game, the game where a culprit must be found so we can all sleep better, or all watch Youtube. The German pundits have pretty much designated the internet and its resulting economic upheaval as the cause. And, in typical German fashion, they also blame the fact that everybody can call themselves a journalist.

And while it has raised serious challenges, as, for example, Columbia University professor Jay Rosen has illustrated, your friends here at the K-Landnews would like to emphasize the control aspect.

Or the loss of said control.

Forty odd years ago, publishing our own stories required either lots of money or a hand cranked mimeograph machine. You had to research in a library far far away, you did your own spell checking, and - with the mimeograph - you needed a drafty room so as not to succumb to the fumes which would cloud your brains and fuck up your judgement.

But the focus on the mechanics of printing and the mechanics of making money (if that is your aim) leaves out the biggest area: an abundance of great information.
As you are reading this, you have more information freely available than you had in all of the Library of Congress four decades ago.

More so, we have experts from all walks of life at our fingertips, making it harder to take any dreary subject and write something useful about it without being challenged when you get your facts wrong.

Even with blatant partisan reporting, your chances of spotting it today are out of this world compared to, say 100 years ago. Read the "today 100 years ago" series in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and you will understand.

The other elephant in the room is our acceptance of obviously dumb and lying journalists while we uphold the banner of "independent and objective". Reporting in at least some media has become a he said she said affair, independent only of one thing: facts.

The best figure in the poll?

Trust in "independent and objective" reporting is lowest among the higher educated citizenry. If you know how the sausage of debate and selecting facts is made...go vegetarian.

But don't dismiss those whose rhetoric and logic is not considered up to the task. Even avid readers of trash journalism flagship Bild Zeitung are not easily abused.

Recounted a friend: when I grew up, my dad would always send me to buy the daily Bild Zeitung with the words go, get me the Lie of the Day.

Maybe it is a good thing that in today's world a single newspaper cannot start a war within a few days like the old Hearst press did.

* Yes, it is a bad pun. No, I'm not sorry.

[Update 5/2/2016] A new study is out! It says that only 34% of Germans think their media is independent. Only 49% of respondents say media reports issues correctly.

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