The Neue Zürcher Zeitung Chastises German Legacy Media
But I doubt it'll change the ways and means employed by the private-public partnership masquerading as legacy media
One more time, dear readers, I’ll post about what I call ‘Stupid Watergate’:
The reason why I do so is easy: it took the Swiss legacy media outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)—one of the better remaining papers in German-speaking Europe—over half a year to end up where readers of this little newsletter have been, information-wise (pun intended), in late January 2024.
So, the below is meant to round off my coverage of ‘Stupid Watergate’ (even though I could pile on, esp. since Dr. Ulrich Vosgerau, an attorney and adjunct professor, recently won his court-case against the editors of Correctiv’s crappy hit-piece), and now—finally—also Germany’s leading legacy media outlets, among them the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, are asking questions. About time, I’d add, but a bit late.
I’ll translate the NZZ piece for you here, with emphases added.
Many German Media Still Shy Away From Dealing With the Correctiv Article on the Potsdam Meeting
The Correctiv platform had to correct the text ‘Secret plan against Germany’. Nevertheless, many German media are still clinging to the original version. This shows a lack of self-criticism.
By Beatrice Achterberg, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 12 Aug. 2024 [source]
A good six months ago, the text ‘Secret plan against Germany’ from the Correctiv platform caused a tremor within Germany. It was about a meeting in Potsdam at which the neo-right-wing activist Martin Sellner spoke to AfD and CDU politicians about his idea of remigration.
The media willingly jumped on the story summarised by Correctiv. In the ‘Tagesschau’ programme, a presenter spoke of ‘deportation plans’, while Der Spiegel was horrified by the ‘deportation summit’. The outrage that followed was colossal. There was hardly a top politician who did not quickly and eagerly condemn the supposed breach of taboo. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered for nationwide demonstrations ‘against the right’.
Rarely has a single text developed such a powerful impact. Recently, Correctiv received the Lighthouse Award [orig. Leuchttum-Preis] from the Network for Investigative Journalism [orig. Netzwerk Recherche] association for ‘special journalistic achievements’. In the past, Der Spiegel editor Juan Moreno, for example, received the award for his spectacular exposure of the Relotius fakes. However, there were early doubts as to how watertight Correctiv’s research was.
Meanwhile, criticism is also being levelled at more left-wing media. Correctiv reacted thin-skinnedly to the apt analysis by Übermedien— a portal dedicated to media criticism. The media critics noted that the ‘principle of non-evidence and gross interpretation’ pervades the entire text. The Correctiv managing director then accused one of the Übermedien authors of being ‘consumed by envy’.
Opinion Instead of Facts
The criticism is justified: to this day, no one can clearly prove what was really discussed at the Potsdam meeting.
Some of the numerous legal disputes over the text did not end well for the research platform in court. Correctiv meekly changed two formulations. The text is teeming with inaccuracies, powerful suggestions, and statements of opinion instead of facts. And this despite the authors’ full-bodied promise to provide an accurate reconstruction of the evening.
One example: ‘Just eight kilometres away from the hotel is the Wannsee Conference Centre, where the Nazis coordinated the systematic extermination of the Jews’. In Der Spiegel, a columnist enthusiastically praised the passage: ‘…Drawing parallels between the behaviour of right-wing extremists then and now is not only legitimate, but even necessary.’
The only difference is that the Potsdam meeting did not discuss the extermination of a group of people, but rather an old concept from the social sciences. One that the representatives of the New Right want to make their own: that of remigration, i.e., the return of migrants to their home countries.
It is true that the mastermind of the New Right, Martin Sellner, has long been peddling the idea that ‘pressure to adapt’ should be exerted on ‘non-assimilated citizens such as Islamists and clan criminals’ in order to achieve their voluntary return. The AfD also called for ‘remigration’ during the 2021 federal election campaign [as did Olaf Scholz, see below]. The Correctiv authors used various rhetorical, dramaturgical, and visual stylistic devices to maximise the gruesome reception of this idea presented in Potsdam.
Other journalists then dramatised the Correctiv version. At the beginning of January, the ‘Tagesschau’ programme said: ‘The topic was apparently the expulsion of millions of people from Germany—including those with a German passport.’ Der Spiegel understood the description to mean that it was ‘about the expatriation, deportation, or displacement of millions of migrants’ and that ‘Germans with a migration background’ also had to leave Germany.
False Facts
The decisive factor, however, is that it was about non-assimilated citizens and that they were not to be persuaded to return by means of expulsion or naturalisation, but by ‘pressure to adapt’. An idea that was surpassed by the SPD [see below], for example, when it called for anti-Semites to be subsequently stripped of their German passports.
Correctiv’s presentation is obviously designed to suggest to every reader that citizens with a migration background should be expelled on the basis of racist ideas—a gross oversimplification that is misleading. The conclusion of the text states that what remains of the meeting is ‘a “masterplan” for the expulsion of German citizens’.
A corresponding passage in a ‘Tagesschau’ article had to be corrected. The lawyer Ulrich Vosgerau, who attended the meeting in Potsdam, successfully defended himself against this portrayal by the state broadcaster.
The Higher Regional Court of Hamburg ruled: ‘From a procedural point of view, it must be assumed that the defendant’s [Correctiv’s] claim that the expulsion of German nationals was discussed at the meeting in Potsdam was untrue.’
It is remarkable that the ‘Tagesschau’ editorial team refused to issue a correction until then on the grounds that Vosgerau was not affected by the statements.
This peculiar objection is representative of the reluctance of some journalists who apparently see themselves as warners and admonishers rather than impartial observers. At least as long as the way in which they portray the issue corresponds to their own political convictions [bingo].
Journalists as Warners and Admonishers
The fact that many journalists have fallen for the dramatisation of the Correctiv text and do not want to move away from it shows a lack of curiosity about what really happened in Potsdam. It feeds the accusation of a ‘lying press’ or, alternatively, a ‘gap press’ [orig. Lückenpresse], which is popular in the right-wing milieu.
Possible objections to Correctiv’s narrative were visible from the outset. The exaggerated historical comparisons, the inaccuracies, the lack of a record of what was said. However, state broadcasters and many other media failed to critically analyse the Correctiv narrative. As a result, the narrative of planned mass deportations continues to haunt the discourse as a spectre.
It is therefore not without a certain irony that it was a Correctiv reporter who recently candidly shared this thought on Platform X: ‘It cannot be that a majority of former GDR citizens, who make up only 1/6 of the total population, are destroying the successful model of the Federal Republic of Germany with their ties to the West.’ [remember: the ‘right-wingers’ are the evil ‘deplorables’ in this amorality tale, not those, like ‘a Correctiv journo’ who seemingly wishes to resurrect the GDR and kick out millions of fellow citizens].
Marcus Bensmann, one of the authors of the Correctiv article on the Potsdam meeting, argues that the strong election results for the AfD, BSW, and Die Linke in eastern Germany mean that we should consider ‘separating’ the eastern German states from the rest of the republic [see, I’m not making this BS up]. An idea just as absurd as the expulsion of millions of Germans with a migration background.
The approach of editorial offices to blow up small revelations for maximum effect seems to have become a systematic in German journalism. Last summer, the Süddeutsche Zeitung tried to catapult the leader of the Free Voters Hubert Aiwanger into political oblivion with its investigation [sic] into the flyer affair.
However, it is still unclear whether Aiwanger is the author of the flyer, which makes fun of the Holocaust in a repulsive manner. The editor-in-chief of Süddeutsche Zeitung confidently stood by the breach of journalistic principles: ‘The authorship is no longer important, the rest is already terrible enough.’ [i.e., facts don’t matter any more]
Similar to the Correctiv revelation, the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s story [sic] also received a prestigious award—the Stern Prize from the Hamburg magazine of the same name. The truthfulness of both texts remains unclear to this day. This reveals a strange professional ethos on the part of the juries: if the result of an investigative story harms those who are supposedly right, journalistic diligence is not so important.
Bottom Lines
The NZZ was quite spot-on to these shenanigans relatively early (Feb. 2024), granted, but Ms. Achterberg now seems to move on to criticising the ‘system’ of ‘journalism’ in Germany. Let’s keep an eye on how this goes…
One of the more curious facets of the entire shit-show is the apparent culture war against regular Germans, their history (warts and all), and their culture: check out this piece in which someone who desired to sing the national (!) anthem was shoed off stage by orderlies:
What a disgrace.
Still, the final frontier ‘even’ the Neue Zürcher Zeitung won’t surpass is—the anarcho-Antifa connections of some of Correctiv’s staff writers, as well as their ties to the current SPD-Greens-FDP federal gov’t. I’ve explored this in-depth in this piece, which I highly recommend:
There is, it seems, a ‘bigger picture’ emerging, though: the Covid shenanigans, exemplified by the acquittal of Sucharit Bahakdi, when coupled with a federal gov’t with abysmal polling data—all three parties, SPD-Greens-FDP, are polling for a combined ± 30% right now—indicate a marked decay of societal norms of post-WW2 Germany.
What the federal gov’t is doing is waging a psy-op against the electorate in the hopes of fending off the coming electoral routs: there’s three state elections in the east, all of which will, likely, see both AfD and Sarah Wagenknecht’s new faction (a pro-Russia left-woke version of what already exists in gov’t, which is rabidly anti-Russian but no less rabidly woke-leftist) winning by leaps and bounds.
It’s quite easy to understand, that is, once one leaves behind the media spin (bias).
Also, do read Die Fackel 2.0 to stay on top of these things, esp. as…
…yep, it was Der Spiegel, interviewing none other than Olaf Scholz, who called for ‘mass deportations’ well before Correctiv got its agents-provocateurs going.