This is a recording I conducted with Mr. Ruediger Lentz - the Director of Deutsche Welle North and South America - earlier this year. We spoke about German media coverage of the United States and the problems of bias, sensationalism and anti-Americanism. We discuss the motivations of German journalists and the connection between governments and media coverage - a fascinating conversation that also includes a discussion of Iraq and American media - and we don't always agree. To listen - CLICK HERE.
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The Debate
- "In much of Europe's public debate, the true meaning of human rights has degenerated into a tool that gives anti-Americanism an aura of legitimacy. The real, horrendous human-rights violations in the Middle East, North Korea, China, Cuba, etc., are largely ignored or relegated to news blurs on the back pages. For front-page coverage, you need an American angle." ---The Wall Street Journal
- "I discovered that European social democracy, too, was a kind of fundamentalism, rigid and doctrinaire, yielding what Swedish writer Johan Norberg calls "one-idea states"—nations where an echo chamber of insular elites calls the shots, where monochrome media daily reiterate statist mantras and shut out contrarian views, and where teachers and professors systematically misrepresent the U.S. (millions of Europeans believe that free public schools, unemployment insurance, and pensions are unknown in America). The more I saw of the European elites' chronic distrust of the public, and the public's habitual deference to those elites, the fonder I grew of the nasty, ridiculous rough-and-tumble of American democracy..." ---Bruce Bawer
- "In the European media as well as on the public stage, prizes and publicity go overwhelmingly to Americans who serve as witnesses against their own government and nation. (...) The defense mechanism is simple enough: "After all, they are saying this, too, so how can we be accused of anti-Americanism?" A similar phenomenon attaches itself to Israel, where "post-" or anti-Zionist spokesmen are given top billing in the European media." ---Josef Joffe
- "The point is to be aware that for many of the foreigners issuing what they claim to be "simply constructive criticism", the evidence shows that criticizing America is all they do, criticizing America is all they ever have done, and criticizing America is all they ever will do." ---Erik Svane, Americans Anonymous
- "To get an impression, take a look at David's Medienkritik, a Web log in English dedicated, among other things, to exposing biased reporting on the United States in the German media. Be it stories about the war in Iraq, the conduct of U.S. soldiers abroad, American reservations regarding the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court or even the Katrina disaster, more often than not the German public is presented with a distorted picture. There are laudable exceptions. But generally the blows are low, and the public is left to form its opinion base on half-truths and false analyses." ---Julian Knapp
- "Negative sentiments and views have been driven not only - or even primarily - by what the United States does, but rather by an animus against what Europeans have believed that America is. While the politics, style, and discourse of the Bush terms - and of President Bush as a person - have undoubtedly exacerbated anti-American sentiment among Europeans and fostered a heretofore unmatched degree of unity between elite and mass opinion in Europe, they are not anti-Americanism's cause. Indeed, a change to a center-left administration in Washington, led by a Democratic president, would not bring about its abatement, let alone its disappearance." ---Andrei Markovits
- "Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your evening catching the latest episode of "24" and then complain about Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York the next day. You can lament the average American's supposed lack of culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the Green Card lottery. Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn't making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there's no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness." ---C.C. Malzahn
- "The protests against nuclear weapons, for instance, concentrated on American weapons. The anti-war rallies were against American-led wars. The anti death penalty campaign focused on Texas. A pattern was emerging and has never seriously been altered. A pattern of willingness to condemn America for the tiniest indiscretion - or to magnify those indiscretions - while leaving the murderers, dictators, and thieves who run other nations oddly untouched." ---Justin Webb
- The fundamental role of anti-Americanism in Europe in general, and particularly among those on the Left, is to absolve themselves of their own moral failings and intellectual errors by heaping them onto the monster scapegoat, the United States of America. For stupidity and bloodshed to vanish from Europe, the U.S. must be identified as the singular threat to democracy (contrary to every lesson of actual history)." ---Jean-François Revel
- "In five years there will be a different President and Iraq will likely be pacified. That would naturally have impacts on the strength of the resentments that have fixed themselves onto certain individuals in the present situation. But beneath the surface smolder the long-burning embers of latent anti-Americanism. It has a long tradition and will remain, also when President Bush is no longer in office and Palestine is peaceful." ---Lutz Erbring
- "A writer for the German weekly Der Spiegel told me during the Iraq debate not to take offense at the crude anti-American covers of the magazine such as the ugly, bearded, drooling Rambo figure it used to show the typical GI in Iraq. 'We're just trying to please our million readers,' he explained." ---Jeff Gedmin
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Quite interesting. Thanks for posting that. Seems he mostly "gets it". And he's willing and able to discuss things rationally (doesn't happen that often in our MSM these days). Of course, he does sit in Washington. People who have actually been to the US tend to be less susceptible to the well-known half-truths, sentiments and prejudices.
PS: I still think the WMDs were there.
Posted by: Mir | July 15, 2007 at 03:37 AM
We're in agreement Mir. I also believe that he had WMD because it's hard to use something that you don't have. Halabja shows that he used chemical weapons. I also believe that what he had in his possession went to Syria.
Ray you do an excellent job of interviewing.
Posted by: Mike H. | July 15, 2007 at 05:27 AM
What a weird view, he drops a lot of gems but entirely lacks any consistent train of thought. There are no ideologies any more, but we are all driven by trends? The little shouting match he is trying to start when asked why that was so at around 17min into the track is very telling.
My impression is that this man does not reject the ideologues for their limited horizons, but because they might stick to principles, and his alternative to them is to be always with the pollsters, whereever they may be going. This is best visible in his attempt to project this opportunism on the pro-war stance of his interlocutor - you were just riding a patriotic wave back then never mind the issues now yadda yadda... (funny thing that he is using that metaphor given the name of the media outlet he is working for)
And there´s unintended humour as well, when he is trying to remember Schröders reelection motto and what pops into his mind instead is the Kaisers colonialism motto from a century ago - I guess this journalistic chameleon would have fit in with any German policy in between.
He´s representative for his profession, and the conversation is representative for the difference between German and American journalists. The interesting question is whether German journalists (the trend is my master, forget the crap I wrote yesterday) or American journalists (don´t criticise my agenda, I must speak truth to power) are better equipped to grasp a world shaped by a fundamentally ideological threat (radical Islam and its secular anti-imperialist satellites). Who can better understand this death cult, a man with no principles whatsoever or one with wrong principles?
Re the Iraq/WMD issue, I thought back then and do now that this was not so much about devices in that country, but about a furcation on one side of which the defunct international system was significantly more likely to gravitate towards a war in which WMD are being used on a grand scale than on the other. Bringing on the infinitely prolonged battle of Iraq finally shed sunlight under the rock of the United Nations - if AQ Khan was still trading WMD with nobody watching, and Persia was arming under the pretext to protect itself against a hostile neighbour the risk would be much higher than they are now.
Posted by: FranzisM | July 15, 2007 at 12:41 PM
Well, what should Mr. Lentz say? He's working for a state-controlled media outlet.
Posted by: MyVoice | July 20, 2007 at 03:12 PM
I think the fact the R. Lentz talks openly about ant-Americanism in the media is a big step forward. I would say that only three years ago DMK was, in the view of many, a fringe blog making bizarre claims about anti-Americanism in the German media.
Today, we have mainstream journalists talking about this issue. For me this is progress. Big progress. In only a few years. I don't feel any satisfaction because it vindicates what we have said for so many years, my only satisfaction comes from the hope that maybe the German media will now find its way back to the principles of journalism.
As Ray said in his interview (by the way, great interview, Ray), the journalists who wrote all the vicious attacks against America are still there, they are still writing. The fact that they scaled down or stopped their attacks doesn't mean that they have any interest in presenting a true unbiased view of America. It only means that they stopped attacking. For now. That's all.
R. Lentz's opinion is that this anti-Americanism is only an irrational trend, a response to America's position in the world as the sole superpower. This doesn't explain though the anti-Americanism of the 80's, when America was not the only superpower. If it's a trend, it's nothing like trends in the world of fashion where the trend changes every season of the year.
Since it's quite a long lasting trend, a trend that at times simmers but never truly dies out, could it be that it is an *ideological* trend?
Posted by: WhatDoIKnow | July 20, 2007 at 05:41 PM