I urge you...

to read this very insightful comment.

Comments

[svetov]

Dear Koepfchen: what I have always been curious about was this SPD connection with the mainstream German media. For instance, the Holtzbrinck-owned Die Zeit has now turned into a completely anti-American vehicle and it has been utterly boring to read for some years; what it used to be is long gone. Maybe after their former senior editor Dönhoff and the publisher Bucerius died, that marked the end of the independence of the weekly, and the SPD party members and Social Democratic ideologues recognized what had fallen into their laps and seized their chance. Now Helmut Schmidt is their senior editor or elder statesman or whatever he is for this German weekly. Holtzbrinck appears definitely to have a "party line." I won't even speak about the unspeakable -- Naumann; because it was under his tutelage and with his editorials that this vicious anti-American swing of Die Zeit occurred in late 2002. But it was already occurring in the fall of 2001. Coincidence? I still remember their reaction to September 11 in the Feuilleton: "Die Weltstunde des Mohammed Atta," ending up printing what was actually a semi-admiring article with regard to Atta and his Islamist cohorts for attacking the megapower America, written by some obscure theater critic. There is a "cultured" barbarism that frequently has its home in the pages of any liberal German feuilleton. As for die Zeit, again, they NEVER printed any critical stories about Schröder, even when he was hired by Putin to work for the Russian government. Additionally, in Die Zeit, again, Schröder and the Greens were treated with kid gloves during the time they were in power. Turn to Der Tagesspiegel, which is also a Holtzbrinck-owned publication. Just some time ago, when Schröder's former go-fer Steinmeier was spouting off about China and the Dalai Lama, when there was a mild scandal, Der Tagesspiegel printed a "background story" about Steinmeier and what he was doing. It was such an utter puff piece, making him seem harmless but yet a formidable force, that I wondered to myself why they even bothered to write it at all. Now I think they were following some line, an unwritten agreement to lay off the SPD. Again, Holtzbrinck. What about the rest of their publications? However, it is more likely this: that the basic attitude of journalists and editors in the German media -- outside of the FAZ and maybe the Springer people -- is that of a German variety of the Gutmensch. So whatever they report and how they do it comes from a middle to left-wing Social Democratic frame of reference for all things. And we all know that nowadays, the SPD is a true shelter for anti-Americanism. What about the rest of the boys in the backroom in the German press corps?