The allegation is that there is too much media concentration in Hungary. That is probably true, but the situation is easily as bad, if not actually much worse, everywhere else and the list counts only 37 heads of government.
source:
Reporters Without Borders lists Orban as an enemy of press freedom
Last week Hungary passed a law supposed to restrict the exposure of LGBT lobby material to children. It’s application is largely public schools, but Bertelsmann’s TV channel RTL Klub warns already that they were perportedly so scared that they could shift the program schedules of classics such as Harry Potter(?!?) or the sitcom ‘Friends.’
As a reaction the stadion in Munich was planned to be lit in protest garish. Tonight Mayor Dieter Reiter wanted to project the rainbow flag on the hall where the soccer match between the multicultural German team and the brute, yet to be enlightened Huns, eh, Hungarians takes place. That plan was scrapped. The organizer UEFA declined. A first and silent attempt to fight back against the constant politicization of everything all the time.
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.
Despite the fact that print media is dwindling rapidly and all news services have internet blogs, large corporations and the German state media pretend that they are the arbiters of truth, utterly different from internet sites like The Daily Wire, Breitbart or The Intercept.
Bertelsmann, the biggest publishing corporation in the world, which is largely run by Angela Merkel’s close friend Liz Mohn, has now broadcast a hit piece against all things internet.
The video starts at a Pegida march. The journalists complain that journalists are not liked and ask people for their opinions.
One unidentified man says that the media is aligned with the powerful, the next one says that we are lied to and vital information is withheld from the public like ‘in darkest GDR times’. GDR is short for German Democratic Republic, which was the name of the socialist dictatorship in Eastern Germany.
Where do people get information from if they distrust the media? One gentleman says he gets news every Monday at the protest marches. One man mentions Breitbart and JouWatch.
JouWatch or Journalistenwatch is a news site founded by author Thomas Böhm. Böhm used to work for various mainstream publications such as taz, Tagesspiegel, Stern, Vogue, tip and Zitty. I quote JouWatch regularly on my blog and regard them as a serious source of information.
According to Bertelsmann’s RTL the topics are already problematic: crimes committed by immigrants, dangers of civil war and the looming of Islamisation.
The Bertelsmann report complains that ‘politicians are defamed’, ‘Merkel is seen as the primary enemy of the state’ and it presents some Russian site that I have never seen in my life before that says Martin Schulz’ father was a concentration camp guard. ‘None of it is true’, says the voice from the off. This ‘it’ stretches at least to ‘Merkel is an enemy’. It is even likely to suggest that everything on the internet is untrue.
They then close in on website ‘unzensuriert.at’, which has 600,000 monthly viewers from Germany and 1.5 million viewers in total. The numbers are wrong. This is the statistics. In TOTAL it only has 200,000 visitors across countries. Few people know the site.
Before the reporter goes undercover to bust this tiny little news blog, they characterize it. The articles ‘try to stir outrage’, which is something the mainstream media apparently can’t be found guilty of.
The site has a category called ‘daily an individual case greets you’ which deals with police reports on crimes committed by immigrants. The Bertelsmann lady says ‘purported crimes committed by immigrants’.
We see her go to a job interview. The drama music is on, the building is called a “student fraternity building” with ‘darkish, cold rooms’; the ‘stucco comes off the wall’.
Editor of the news site is Alexander Höferl, who is also communication director of conservative party FPÖ. He tells the undercover lady that his site aligns with Austria’s FPÖ and Germany’s AfD. In other words, it is a conservative news site.
Bertelsmann runs a mini study on the reporting over the previous fortnight. The result is that:
They obviously hand-picked a website that is conservative, but basically very obsessed with one issue. That’s probably the reason why it hardly grabbed my attention and has only 600,000 viewers in Germany.
To the tune of thriller music the lady’s voice says the site ‘creates animus against migrants and competing political parties’. Bear in mind that “serious” media creates animus against Russians, Americans, the Polish, the French, Hungarians, Israel and conservatives.
‘The truth seems to be secondary’, says the lady. As an example she presents a situation where she is confronted with an article that says that apartments in Hamburg are confiscated to accommodate refugees. The article is wrong. There is a law that allows empty flats to be turned over to accommodate refugees, but it was not used at the time.
It is indeed a sloppy mistake. The lady asserts, ‘in professional media there is a duty to only publish what one has checked’. We all see far too many mistakes on your side, girl! The mistake is, however, immaterial because she guns for more and throws her net to catch all the news sources and unzensuriert’s way of fact checking. Alexander Höferl finds an article published on David Berger’s Philosophia Perennis which he believes confirms the information in question.
Dr. David Berger is a well-known author and publisher, who sourced his article with information from the Gatestone Institute. Gatestone sourced to mainstream media outlets, predominantly to newspaper Berliner Zeitung. Both Berger and Gatestone were transparent about their sources.
Finally the lady complains that the news site is aligned with right-wing parties and that it is not ‘objective’. The site does not claim to be objective. Bertelsmann, mainly headed by Angela Merkel’s close friend Liz Mohn, claims to be objective.
On 25th September, the author of cat detective story Felidae, a smashing success that was turned into an animated movie (video above), will be summoned to a court in Dresden. He was already sentenced for the speech in question under §130 StGB in February, but appealed the verdict. He is expected to pay 11.700 Euro in fines.
The “criminal” words were spoken in October 2015 when Pirinçci held a speech at a Pegida rally. The former Muslim spoke of the unorganised refugee accommodations as Muslim trash dumps, he warned of a replacement of the German population, called the 2015 immigration wave ‘invaders’ and ‘future butchers’. Current political leaders were attacked as ‘Gauleiter acting against their own people’. Gauleiter were local Nazi leaders during the Third Reich.
The state persecutor says the phrases are inciting hatred against Muslims who lived already in Germany and those who came to Germany in 2015. The former notion is most obviously false. He also claims that Pirinçci deliberately tried to ‘heat up’ the purported animus against Muslims. Somehow he adds that Pirinçci dismisses the “right” of Muslims to live “as equals in a statist community”. Chills run down my spine. Apparently, communism is a right.
At the Pegida speech Pirinçci described a situation in the German state of Hesse in which a politician of Merkel’s party CDU told a critic of a refugee accommodation that the latter be free to leave Germany. Pirinçci opined that politicians have lost their fear from and respect for the people and as a consequence think they can recommend people to leave if they don’t obey.
Pirinçci added that, if we don’t obey, the authoritarian nature of our politician makes them crave for an alternative to expelling us, ‘but to their dismay the concentration camps are out of business’.
Following the speech, his publisher Bertelsmann stopped selling his hugely successful books, both his political and nonpolitical works (including Felidae).
Source FAZ.NET
Before I get to the meat I have to define a word that I can’t define. Bear with me!
‘Populisten’ is not the translation of populist. Populist means pushing for policies that are wildly popular in the electorate. The folks at Breitbart.com use that term. It must not be confused with the German word populisten. Nobody ever uses it for himself and a meaning is only assigned at the very moment an opponent is smeared. So in a way the headline reads ‘Bertelsmann says one third of Germans are trash.’
So what is Bertelsmann’s on-the-fly definition for populisten? Jean-Jacque Rousseau is one. If you believe in a government that respects the sovereignty of the people (they use the very word ‘Volkssouveränität‘) you are one of these evil populisten. They even invent a new word, the detestable ‘provolkssouveränität’!
The US founding fathers are also populisten for they were sceptical about a concentration of power and the elites as a group.
Robert Vehrkamp, one of the authors of the study, condescendingly says, “Populisten in Germany are rather disaffected democrats than radical enemies of democracy as such.”
People who don’t believe in the sovereignty of the people and who -after Germany has seen two dictatorships over the course of the last hundred years- feel elites can still be blindly trusted are most likely to vote for Merkel’s CDU or the Green party (and they are supposed to be the good people).
For everybody who pays attention that doesn’t come as a surprise. For a cynic like me it is rather a surprise that one in three Germans do believe what the founding fathers believed and another third partly believes in democracy (as it was defined by those who created it).
sources: ZEIT ONLINE and sciencefiles
Goldstein 