Germany’s Obsession
By Callimachus | Related entries in Blogging, Media, The WorldDavid’s Medienkritik is a blog that has been tracking the coverage of America and U.S. issues in the mainstream media in Germany.
As someone who loves Germany, but also reads the language and follows the media, I can tell you, he’s not cherry-picking. It really is that bad.
In the repeated rush to judge the United States from the moral mountaintops of Europe, most German media have long forgotten Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror. A morbid obsession with American crimes, real and perceived, has replaced most authentic concern for international human rights.
And the contrast couldn’t be more extreme: While the German government busily promotes German industry at annual trade fairs in Khartoum, the German media quietly looks the other way as the Sudanese government continues its campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Darfur. On the other hand, when previously unseen photos of Abu Ghraib recently emerged, the German media had an absolute field day. SPIEGEL came out with a particularly exploitative cover and finger-wagging editorials popped up like so many mushrooms.
… It is not our intent at Davids Medienkritik to quell or discourage discussion on the legitimacy of Guantanamo as a means of dealing with stateless enemy combatants or the very real abuses at Abu Ghraib. The very opposite is true: These are vitally important issues and we believe they must be discussed and debated openly and constructively.
But that isn’t happening in Germany. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have become little more than populist baseball bats with which leftists media and political elites repeatedly bludgeon the United States and George W. Bush.
I don’t always agree with his interpretations; I thought the connection of the mosquito blood-sucking foreign investors with old anti-Semitic images was rather over-emphasized. But those disagreements are minor and few.
Plenty of media around the world take a skeptical view of everything American. When we speak, they assume we lie. When we act, they presume the darkest and most selfish motives. But the Germans take it a step further. They are eager to equate all America’s bad deeds with the worst crimes of history. They don’t just downplay anything that might cross that path; they outright ignore it. An occasional contratian op-ed piece might make it into print, but it bounces off the news coverage like Jello off a freight train.
It becomes impossible for me to read German media, week in and week out, and not believe their eagerness is in part based on a psychological need to find utter criminality in the soul of America, a nation that has held Germany’s historical crimes up to the light.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 and is filed under Blogging, Media, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 16th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Or maybe they’re still mad over that “axis of weasels” stuff.
March 16th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
This goes back before that, I’m afraid. It’s been a crescendo, but it was going on before Iraq.