(By Ray D.)
Guess what: This will really surprise you...According to the left-of-left cranks on ZDF's weekly investigative news program "Frontal 21", George W. Bush is under "pressure" again. If I had a dime for every time Bush and Blair were under pressure in the German media, I'd be a rich man. And of course, Gerhard Schroeder, the head of an imploding wreck of a government, is rarely if ever under pressure. Ah, the delightful and contradictory fantasy world of the German media.
ZDF and many in the German media criticize George W. Bush for being overly simplistic, for repeating the same message over and over again. They also criticize him for "lying" on Iraq as they just did in a two-part "Frontal 21" piece entitled "The Lies of the White House." In fact, the people at ZDF are more guilty of those very offenses than anyone else.
For example, they incessantly repeat the claim President Bush "lied" on weapons of mass destruction. That has been clearly disproved by numerous investigations carried out by committees in both the US and the UK and there is absolutely no evidence that supports such a claim. But it continues to appear over and over again in the German media. The fact that Bush was provided flawed intelligence upon which he acted is simply overlooked and ignored. The fact that John Kerry, the United Nations and the German intelligence authorities also believed until the war broke out that Saddam had WMDs and posed a threat is also conveniently forgotten.
"Frontal 21": Americans Motivated by Fear, Isolation
ZDF goes on to portray Americans as motivated by fear and isolation in this election. "Fear is the message" of the Bush campaign, and Americans are looking for a strong leader after 9/11 according to "Frontal 21". The program concludes that "the truth gets lost along the way." According to ZDF, most Americans do not own a passport and can't understand what is going on in the rest of the world. It is further claimed that Americans have been cowed into supporting Bush by the notion that it is "unpatriotic" to criticize the President in a time of war. ZDF clearly implies that Americans are ignorant, fear-ridden little robots who simply aren't as enlightened, lucid and courageous as their European brothers.
ZDF also conveniently ignores the fact that Saddam Hussein was just waiting for sanctions to be lifted to restart his WMD program. And here is a glaring contradiction: Many in the German media would have us believe that Saddam was harmless and would have never developed WMDs. Yet we now know that nuclear materials have gone missing in Iraq. Well, what were nuclear materials doing in Iraq if Saddam had no intention to build a bomb? Atomic power in a land overflowing with oil?
Ironically, it seems that ZDF believes that if they repeat their distortions and hate towards President Bush enough that the German people will come to accept them as fact. The unprecedented character assasination perpetrated by the German media since 9/11 against the President of the United States has born ample fruit. Only 4% of Germans approve of President Bush. This uniformity of opinion harkens back to Nazi times. It is an indicator that the German people have been misinformed and disinformed on a massive scale. They are the victims of a bias so large and pervasive that it has permanently damaged German-American relations.
Has the German Media Learned Nothing from the Holocaust? Why Won't They Tell the German People the Truth about Saddam's Iraq?
If you visit ZDF's website, you will see virtually no mention of the recent discovery of a series of mass graves in Iraq containing mothers still holding their children. While the US media is giving top priority to the story, it is largely being swept under the rug in Germany. One might ask how a German state news program could ignore or downplay mass murder after the Holocaust. Yet that is exactly what the network and many others in the German media have done. Just look at SPIEGEL ONLINE: Currently, there is no prominent link to the mass graves story on the homepage, but at the very top of the page, for the third day in a row they have a featured story on conspiracy theories claiming that Bush was wired for the debates. This is yet another telling example of the warped priorities in the German press. An unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is given priority over the discovery of mass graves. Why? Because one story does harm to Bush and the other clearly does not. This is more of the shameful, arrogant and disgusting bias that characterizes SPIEGEL and ZDF.
But the truth and reality have all been pleasantly drowned out by the steady drone of Bush lied...Bush lied...Bush lied...and the German people keep on buying it. Sad but true.
The German Media's Big Lie: Iraq Was Better Off Under Saddam
The Horror: German Media Don't Want to Show You This. Hundreds of Thousands of Dead Lie in Saddam's Mass Graves. Some Will Never Be Found.
You would think that a media obsessed with every civilian death in Iraq following the war would also be deeply troubled by the genocide carried out by Saddam Hussein's regime. Think again. Just look at what Medien Tenor, a media research institute had to say on the subject:
"As long as German TV journalists don’t return to their real task of the neutral selection and presentation of news, the worked up mood will not quiet itself. ARD and ZDF presented Germans the situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein as significantly better than that since the end of his dictatorship. If the Germans were respected before the national elections of 2002, it was the fact that Schroeder and Fischer made the German house at the UN into the central location for the organization of resistance against the politics of George W. Bush and Colin Powell which tore open a deep gap. Especially German TV broadcasters worked less in that situation as news reporters and instead came across as part of “their” government.” The consequences are shown by the current (January 2004) Medien Tenor analysis.
The portrayal of the four players (Gerhard Schroeder, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Saddam Hussein) on the political world stage in the German TV news decisively contributed to the fact that, on the German side, no understanding of the fundamental decisions made by America and England could come into being. In the relevant weeks before the second Iraq War, ARD through PRO 7, RTL, SAT 1 all the way to ZDF barely drew a distinction between democracy and dictatorship in their news coverage. As a result, large parts of the German public only had concerns about America. This evaluation barrier, that until now was only speculative, has now been made visible with data from continual analysis of media content."
Given this state of affairs, how can Germans and Americans possibly engage in a constructive debate on Iraq? Maybe the German media doesn't want us to...
amen
Posted by: | October 13, 2004 at 09:27 PM
Go on and watch the film "WMD" coming soon (www.iraqitruthproject.com).
It's about the mass killings of Saddam and is to be an Anti-Fahrenheit 9/11-Film.
Let's see whether such films get the same audience like Moore's films.
Posted by: samir al-iraqi | October 14, 2004 at 01:03 AM
Well done, Ray. The media zeitgeist being what it is, it's harder to see through these things when the same lefties repeat the same unsubstaciated nonsense over and over.
Posted by: Joe N. | October 14, 2004 at 01:06 AM
Well, it makes sense in a way. We can't help the dead, no matter how monstrously they were murdered. We must confine ourselves to helping the living. In this case the man who gave the orders for mass-murder. Saddam Hussein.
The subject of the next documentary is the awfulness and doubtful legality of the way the poor lambs (aka Nazi war criminals) were treated after WWII at the Nurenberg trials....
Posted by: Don | October 14, 2004 at 01:31 AM
"(Germans) are the victims of a bias so large and pervasive that it has permanently damaged German-American relations."
Germans are no victims here, it takes two.
Posted by: hm | October 14, 2004 at 02:00 AM
Oh and btw, where are the German media reports on the missing nuclear material in Iraq ?
What??? Iraq had nuclear material??? No way!
Posted by: hm | October 14, 2004 at 02:02 AM
They honestly think we're afraid? We fight because we're afraid, they don't because they're not? This must be too subtle and cultured for me. Here all along I thought we were furious.
Well, since we're so scared, how about if Europe sends over some armored divisions and fighter wings to protect us? Maybe a couple of aircraft carrier battle groups would be nice. Did the French ever get the Charles de Gaulle to work without irradiating the crew?
Posted by: Mitch | October 14, 2004 at 03:32 AM
Brilliant piece Ray.
All hell will once again break loose on this euro continent, which millions have fled for generations. euro hatred of the US stems solely from the fact that those in the US are the generations of who quite willfully got the hell out of the stagnant continent. It's too bad these generations of US citizens(3 or 4 generations to be exact) had to come back to the shores it fled to pound sanity into the fiefdoms. So to hell with the euro attitude and the ideological trendiness they suckle so greedily on, they are truly baking in their own shit now. When one listens to what def mnstr peter struck said yesterday, and combines that with the sentiment of the german media shown above, you can see and smell the impotence.
The countries of europe have now been re-populated by half-wits whose ideologies concerning Marx were learned in a cave far away. They have resurrected an insanity that has cursed europe and the world with blood many times already. You simply provide oil vouchers to grease the bums of euro "leaders", who then pay for their welfare states by selling weapons to freaks. Even euro ex-colonial possessions are bleeding the world over. What makes this continent kick itself in the head so many times, and yet again now yell like a little spoon-fed prik towards the US?
When one combines the dusty left-wing mind of a euro MP with that described above, this waste product from the media is what you get.
Posted by: Pato | October 14, 2004 at 04:09 AM
Fischer in der Berliner Zeitung:
"Ich glaube auch nicht, dass der Irak mit mehr Militär zu stabilisieren ist, geschweige denn durch mehr westliches Militär. Auch dies würde als Fortsetzung der Besatzung empfunden werden."
Stellt sich nur die Frage, wie der Irak sonst zu stabilisieren ist, oder ob er sich dafür erst gar nicht interessiert. Leider stellt der Interviewer diese Frage nicht.
Posted by: DDD | October 14, 2004 at 08:31 AM
Dieser Mascolo scheint der neue Washington-Korrespondent von SPIEGEL-ONLINE zu sein, während Pitzke quer durch das Land reist, um antiamerikanische Amerikaner ausfindig zu machen, und Gerhard Spörl sicherlich schon an seinen Obsessionen zu Grunde gegangen ist.
Bushs Vorsprung ist dahin
Von Georg Mascolo, Washington
Beim dritten und letzten TV-Duell vor der Wahl mussten sowohl US-Präsident Bush als auch sein Herausforderer Kerry schwere Wertungstreffer einstecken. Aber keiner der beiden ging in der Arena von Arizona K.o. Nach drei Live-Debatten steht fest: Kerry konnte seinen Rückstand auf den amtierenden Präsidenten wettmachen.
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,323024,00.html
Posted by: Downer | October 14, 2004 at 09:31 AM
I watched on ZDF the junk Ray writes about and I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. As Ray pointed out, I guess only during Nazi time was there such an uniformity of opinion among Germans. It is absolutely ghostly.
Without exaggerating a bit I felt as if I had traveled back in time, in Ceausescu's Romania where I used to live. The ZDF "documentary" had all the fingerprints of a well-versed propaganda machine, which I thought I would never see and hear again. At least, not in Western Europe.
But the propaganda machine is alive and well. Back then it was about Ceausescu's eroic deeds, the march of communism and socialism towards victory and the death of the capialist system. Today, here, it is about the superiority and wisdom of the EU way and the backwardness of almost everything American.
I can't even begin explaining what I feel when the German media picks up voluntarily and happily where the Communist media left off. The actions of the German media are, in my own view, criminal.
Posted by: WhatDoIKnow | October 14, 2004 at 01:51 PM
Afraid? Hardly.
Enraged at what happened? Yes.
Indifferent to what Europe thinks because we've taken it's abuse for how long? Got that in one.
Posted by: Jewels (AKA Julian) | October 14, 2004 at 01:57 PM
I'm getting tired of this passport nonsense.
We don't need on to visit Mexico and Canada. And no one can say their cultures are like ours.
Posted by: Sandy P | October 14, 2004 at 05:18 PM
"Only 4% of Germans approve of President Bush. This uniformity of opinion harkens back to Nazi times."
Quite so. But one should compare Germany to other European countries. In The Netherlands we recently had a similar opinion survey. The following results were reported: 41% was in favour of Kerry, 9% in favour of Bush, the remaining 50% was either too ignorant, or reasonable enough to answer that they had no opinion on this subject or could not say whom they approved or disappoved most.
So, though the situation is not as bad as in Germany, in Holland too there is a quite alarming uniformity of opinion, notwithstanding the more balanced government's stand, but corresponding to the left-wing dominated mainstream media.
Regrettably, in France or Belgium the situation is probably not much better than in Germany.
Posted by: Kees Rudolf | October 15, 2004 at 02:59 PM
Contrary to the claim above it has never been disproved by any investigation that Bush and members of his government lied about Iraqi WMDs and the evidence of ties between Iraq an Al Qaeda. In fact there is overwhelming evidence for such a claim. Bush's lies include misrepresentations of the UN inspections in the 1990s, misleading statements about possible Iraqi nuclear programs and statements in which the certainty of a large Iraqi threat was exaggerated (Bush implied in several speeches that there was no doubt about a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda - example).
The US Senate is going to investigate possible misrepresentations of the evidence on Iraq's WMDs after the election. I guess they will have a lot to do.
Note from David: Anonymous, could you kindly define the requirements of a "lie"?
Posted by: | October 15, 2004 at 03:54 PM
Note from David: Anonymous, could you kindly define the requirements of a "lie"?
Firstly, I want to state that conservative defenders of Bush are right in one point: You normally call a person a liar that makes a false statement AND knows that it's false. (On the other hand, in cases where it's debatable wether he knew he was making false claims, it would be unconvincing not to use a higher standard for someone like the President of the US. Someone in this position should and could inform himself properly. That's why my viewpoint on this issue is In dubio contra reo.
So if Bush says he knew that Saddam Hussein was directly tied to Al Qaeda - as he did in the speech I provided in my last posting - and we have people like Colin Powell (earlier this year) or Donald Rumsfeld saying that the administration never had "strong hard evidence" for such a link - how would you call that? I would call it a lie.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 15, 2004 at 07:47 PM
Anonymous, be accurate in your quotations if you won't be a liar. Here is the original. He did not say there were NO evidence. This is a media lie which you are repeating here:
"Q: My name is Glenn Hutchins. Mr. Secretary, what exactly was the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?
SEC. RUMSFELD: I tell you, I'm not going to answer the question. I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way. Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was. To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two. There are -- I just read an intelligence report recently about one person who's connected to al Qaeda who was in and out of Iraq and there's the most tortured description of why he might have had a relationship and why he might not have had a relationship. There are reports about people in Saddam Hussein's intelligence service meeting in one country or another with al Qaeda people from one person to another, which may have been indicative of something, or may not have been. It may have been something that was not representative of a hard linkage.
What we do know is that Saddam Hussein was on the terrorist list. We do know they were giving $25,000 to suicide bombers. So, this is not the Little Sisters of the Poor. (Laughter.) But, what I would -- to answer it, when I'm in Washington, I pull out a piece of paper and say "I don't know, because I'm not in that business, but I'll tell you what the CIA thinks," and I read it, the public version of it. If you want a -- not terribly current now, but George Tenet did testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a version of it was unclassified -- declassified -- later, which you can get and read if you want to see the answer that he gave.
But it is -- it is -- the relationships between these folks are complicated. They evolve and change over time. In many cases, these different networks have common funders. In many cases, they cooperate not in a chain of command but in a loose affiliation, a franchising arrangement almost, where they go do different things and cooperate but they're not, in the case of al Qaeda, most -- my impression is most of the senior people have actually sworn an oath to Osama Bin Laden, and even, to my knowledge, even as of this late date, I don't believe Zarqawi, the principal leader of the network in Iraq, has sworn an oath, even though what they're doing -- I mean, they're just two peas in a pod in terms of what they're doing."
Posted by: Gabi | October 15, 2004 at 08:33 PM
But, anonymous, you are in the middle of German mainstream: They are too silly to understand the difference between "no evidence" and "no strong evidence". And I guess Kerry and his followers have the same problem. I wonder why.
Posted by: Gabi | October 15, 2004 at 09:05 PM
Dear group,
I just learned of your existence. I am an American citizen with a German wife, from Berlin, and visit Germany at least once a year, since before the Wall fell down, in fact. My observations are, clearly, that since 9-11, the German mass media has gone nuts with radical leftist anti-American and even anti-Israel sentiment. Perhaps it was this way also before 9-11, but that is when I began to take note of it. My wife is the German speaker (meine ist schrecklish) and she regularly reads the German newspaper web sites, and we compare them to reports in American press of a more conservative nature, who are far more accurate than the liberal media. I wrote an article on this problem, detailing my work-observations, which you might enjoy to read:
"Masters Of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry"
http://www.orgonelab.org/MastersOfDeception.htm
After writing this and posting it out, I got back many incredible hate-filled replies from Europeans, shocking in fact, given the unjustifiable high regard in which Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are held, like Saints.
For excellent information on world events, with a focus on the middle east and current elections, I would highly recommend the following websites, which are updated daily:
Front Page Magazine
http://www.frontpagemag.com
Jihadwatch
http://www.jihadwatch.org
Kind regards,
James
Posted by: James | October 16, 2004 at 07:24 AM
I wonder wether it makes sense to reply to a posting 9 days later. But I think the few people who might still read this should get my actual point:
1. There was no "strong hard evidence" or "smoking-gun concrete evidence" (Powell). There is a difference between "no strong" or "no concrete" evidence and "no" evidence (Powell explicitly and Rumsfeld implicitly said that they found it "prudent to consider the possibility" of a connection), but both statements clearly indicate that the information the intelligence community had about a link was far from being conclusive.
2. Now, look at George W. Bush's speech once again. To demonstrate that Iraq was a "grave and gathering threat", as he put it later, he said he knew Saddam had got "ties with Al Qaeda". He implied certainty. This obviously contradicts Colin Powell's and Donald Rumsfeld's accounts. So, even though Powell and Rumsfeld also played a role in the "war-marketing", their remarks are indeed smoking-gun concrete evidence that Bush lied.
3. That is not the only example of a "We know it"-lie. Even if you - unlike me - do believe that lies of this kind are the only thing Bush is to blame for: Thus the Bush government made people believe that it had not to be questioned wether there is really a threat, that more exact information is not needed. Since a war - even if it overthrows a brutal mass-murderer - always is a great tragedy one would normally have considered very well wether the threat was real, tried to check wether his assessments of Iraq's terror contacts and Iraq's deadly arsenals were true. But Bush seemingly didn't want to do so.
Posted by: | October 24, 2004 at 12:49 PM