What Is The Green Feces Campaign? #GruenerMist

The Green party is ubiquitous in German life. Public broadcasters are gushing. The corporate media is gushing. Legend has it that they even recycle their bathwater as drinks. And yet polls suggest that they will only win around 20% of the votes in the upcoming general election.

Why bother then? Because the other parties – with the exception of the AfD – are following the same script. It is their policies that will be pushed through, no matter what. They are the equivalent of the AOC-wing of the US Democrats which has driven every concern for the little guy out of their party. We are witnessing a snobbish cult infecting one public institution after the other and leaves behind nothing but empty shells, exclusively answerable to their political whims.

Finally an initiative is propping up info posters in the big city where political education is in dire need: Green Feces, #GruenerMist!

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The Declining German Press And The Coup d’Editorial Boards

The talk gives an overview of the German print media, its sales and its mutual ties. Did you know who owns Random House/Penguin or the Business insider today? What are the major #publications and what segment of society do they reach? What are their strategic roles? And what has the Social Democratic Party SPD to do with the supposedly independent press? What is the “research compound” of public broadcasters and newspaper Sueddeutsche? Who was the last SED party leader before its first renaming and who is now a regular columnist for Burda magazine Superillu? Did a streamlining of the editorial boards facilitate the rise of the radical left? The case study of Wirtschaftswoche (wiwo), a weekly manager and economics magazine, may give an idea of what happened behind the doors of the big publishers somewhat between 2014 and 2016.

My video about the SED name changes.

Correction: I said that I would link up the article with the Madsack article and until recently I found it either on waybackmachine or on archive.is. For whatever reason, I’m not so lucky now. So here is the dead URL. Leave me a comment if you know some archive where it still can be found.

ARD Boss Rainald Becker Claims LINKE Were Not The Heir of SED

Rainald Becker, the editor in chief of public broadcaster ARD and its “Coordinator for Politics, Society and Culture”, tries to whitewash the party that ran the East German dictatorship. If you believe the party LINKE were the heir of the SED, you have understood nothing, he says. But have you understood nothing? You have. But you must know some details to recognize why LINKE is indeed not the heir of the SED. It IS the SED!

(City of Dresden’s) General Attorney Lorenz Haase Looks For Laws to Punish Protesters Who Spoke to Media

People who are most outspoken about “equality” are hardly ever for equality before the law. Instead of upholding the rules Lorenz Haase chooses targets and looks for weaponizable laws later. “Acceptance of a crime”, “incitement to hatred”, “lack of respect for the dead” … some section of the law will hit the Pegida protesters that talked to TV show Kontraste. Guilty they are.

source: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/pegida-aeusserungen-zum-luebcke-mord-staatsanwaltschaft-leitet-verfahren-wegen-billigung-von-straftaten-ein/24528816.html

State TV is the Opposite of State Dependency – says Head of ARD Karola Wille

Karola Wille

ARD is one of three large agencies that constitute German public broadcasting. With a budget of about 8 billion euro per year Germany has the most expensive state propaganda machinery in the world.

The following article is based on a text by Dr. Wolfgang Hintze, originally published on the blog of civil rights hero Vera Lengsfeld.

Do you know the opposite of the state? Anti-statism? Independence from the state? Free media? All wrong! The answer is: the opposite of the state is tax-financed public broadcasting!

You don’t believe it? I first did neither, but Monday evening it was officially announced on news shows Tagesschau:

The model of a tax-financed broadcast is the exact opposite of the state, because the state does not pay for what it offers, but the citizens.

This cynical sentence, which mocked the population, was offered to the viewer. Those who understood it immediately are shocked, the rest can follow them next. Bear with me!

The citizen, who under the threat of state sanctions (i.e. drastic penalties) must pay a compulsory fee to preserve the ever-growing public broadcasters, is used as legitimization that public broadcasting is the opposite of the state.

The public service broadcaster is thus a kind of broadcasting from the citizen to the citizen, a circle of well-wishers who like to throw their money into the tithe.

There are two aspects: firstly, funding through a compulsory fee imposed by the state, and secondly the program offered for it. The fee/tax is indeed independent of whether the citizen can receive any program at all – an absurdity which can hardly be explained to any rational man.

In addition to the “Bread and Games” section, the contents are often state propaganda and a leadership cult, critical reports are a rarity. The Tagesschau is called by many “Aktuelle Kamera”, which was the name of the news show in socialist Eastern Germany, a show which people only accidentally saw if they did not change the channel in time. Free information is obtained from today’s “Western television”, the Internet.

Mathias Döpfner, President of the Federal Association of Newspaper Publishers, has now criticized public broadcasters with a bold comparison:

“It takes a variety of private media options. To have only state television and a state press representation on the internet would be rather to the taste of North Korea.”

ARD chairwoman Karola Wille, the woman who gave us the bonmot about the definition of the opposite of state, is outraged:

Such a choice of words plays into the hands of populists and conspiracy theorists. The ARD and the newspapers should rather stand together for what makes us strong and what our society needs. And that is credibility today, that is reliability, that is good journalism.

Well roared, lioness!

But who is Karola Wille? According to Wikipedia she was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt in Saxony [then GDR]. She entered the [socialist all-controlling party] SED at the age of 18, studied law in the lawless GDR, and worked at the Leipzig Institute for International Studies. The latter had a keen eye on the “class enemy”, i.e. Western Germany. She worked there with a high-ranking secret service member, a stasi officer. For some time she was also married with a military prosecutor of the GDR.

Honestly, who would not like to see Frau Wille at the highest post of the central propaganda department of the Federal Republic – the public service broadcasting agency ARD – with this impressive CV? Nobody has to wonder why people find the compulsive fee utterly cynical.

Jürgen Braun of Conservative Party AfD Charges State Radio Station SWR Because He Minds a Song

Last Saturday at 23:24 p.m. German radio station Dasding/SWR, a proxy of state agency ARD, aired a song which was indexed as ‘a threat to the youth’ by the Federal Agency for the Control of Youth-Threatening Media (German: Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien BPjM).

Both the BPjM and Jürgen Braun claim that it ‘threats violence’. The lyrics of the song ‘Flora remains’ (German: Flora bleibt’) call for the preservation of the notorious socialist hotspot ‘Red Flora’ (German: Rote Flora) in the city of Hamburg. The Red Flora is part of a former theater which is now illegally occupied by autonomous squatters.

The lines that are apparently not “covered by free speech” are ‘you’ll get nothing out of Flora but kicks to your face’, ‘a little rebellion, a little damage’ and ‘woman, man, unite against Germany’!

The song is no direct threat to any individual and would be protected under the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The law to protect ‘the youth’ is misused against an airing of a song shortly before midnight.

Polls strongly suggest that Jürgen Braun (AfD) will be a member of parliament after the general election.

source JouWatch

German Public Broadcasters Demand Tax Raise

Public broadcasters demand that the public broadcasting tax will be raised from 17.50 to 21.00 Euro per month before 2019. They argue with a straight face that this was the only way they could ‘save’ the targeted 2.2 billion Euro until 2024.

The annual budget of German public broadcasters is the largest in the world and amounts to about 8 billion Euro a year.

News blog FAZ.net reports that the heads of the three umbrella agencies responsible for various TV channels, radio stations and websites are planning to formally submit their proposal for the hike in September to the leaders of the German states. The hike is expected to come in steps of about 2% tax raises per year.

Conservative party AfD objects to the proposal because they don’t view German public broadcasting as honest and balanced anyway. The problem, according to AfD, is that the controlling council, the Rundfunkrat, is composed of politicians from larger, more powerful political parties.

Head of the broadcasting commission, called Rundfunkkommission, is Malu Dreyer of left-wing party SPD, who also holds the offices speaker of the upper house of the parliament, prime minister of state Rhineland-Palatinate and head of the administrative council of ZDF. ZDF is not only a large public TV channel but one of the before mentioned three government agencies that constitute German public broadcasting.

Since 2013 AfD have asked for and continue to demand the thorough abolition of the tax.

What is particularly troubling about German public broadcasting is that they viciously protect their copyrights. While private companies in the English-speaking world give away their news material the moment after broadcasting and people are happy to quote public figure on YouTube, Facebook and twitter, videos the production of which is paid by tax payers are technically and legally protected. You hardly find videos of Merkel speaking German on the internet. As a consequence the opposition cannot prove any point. Even the use of logos and images are a big deal. This is all for the purpose of stifling public debate and it works a charm.

source: Jouwatch

My Journalism Career in Germany is Over – Says WDR Reporter Claudia Zimmermann after Slip of the Tongue

source: meedia.de

About one and a half years ago Claudia Zimmermann mentioned in a radio show broadcasted in the Netherlands that employees of German public broadcasters such as her employer TV channel WDR are „asked to report pro-government“.

WDR denied her claim and Frau Zimmermann backed off. It did not help her much. She is currently negotiating the terms of her leaving and does not see a future either with broadcasters or publishers any more.

Now that a study is out that selectivly concedes her claim on the matter of reporting about the immigration crisis, she opens up again.

Yes, she had backed off saying there were no direct orders by the government, she admits. However, she adds, “large broadcasters such as ARD (the mother company of WDR) and ZDF are criticised as state television, and in my view that is correct. There is too little criticism of the government. The reason is not that the journalists are bad. The system itself works its way top-down. Senior editors and studio managers take care that critical stories don’t even get aired”

The hiring policies of public broadcasters and the dependency of the regular yet ‘free’ employees already hempered a critical assessment of the government and the migration crisis, she opines.

„If somebody reports critically on problems that have to do with the refugees, he will swifly be cornered as a right-winger [translation note: this means already nothing less than a neo-Nazi]. Still today the problems with the refugees are put into far too positive light“.

Since her radio appearance she was not given any work at WDR. In the 25 years before eight out of ten of her work proposals were greenlighted, she says. That all has changed. She fell into a depression, though she uses the fancy-shmancy word burn-out.

After her slip of the tongue she was ordered to hand in her work proposals to the studio management and not to the editors any more. The excuses for not running her stories ranged from ‘too complicated’, ‘beyond the region WDR is assigned with’ to ‘we have run something similar already’.

WDR denies the claims. She was ‘evidently’ given work. Claudia Zimmermann was allowed to contribute two 30 seconds videos during the course of one and a half years despite submitting suggestions on a weekly basis. Her name was not mentioned to the viewers in both.

Frau Zimmermann who speaks Dutch fluently continues to work in the Netherlands which are still a democracy. She will also publish a book about online brokers titled ‘Terroristen der Finanzmärkte’ which translates to ‘Terrorists of the Financial Markets’. It will be out on 31st of July.

Edit Meanwhile she gave a German-language interview to Russian state media outlet sputniknews.

… and another one with Russia Today