When I think about my profession then it is about reporting, questioning, investigating, analysing and opinion. Concerning the latter, you can be shure: No journalist is neutral even if he or she just reports on something. On what and how he reports may be shaped by his own socialisation or that of his employer, consciously or unconsciously, however, he can never take a pure neutral stand. The more important it is to questioning yourself on what you write as a journalist and how.
If I write today on unemployment in the European Monetary Union, for example, I proof the statistics and the logic behind it. If I write on the same topic again the next day I do the same thing again, just to be on the safe side and not to betray myself. One of the followers of WuG at twitter has a nice sentence on his account: “” That is exactly what journalism is all about. But today it is not! Today many if not most journalists do not independently analyse they just choose a source – if at all – which fits to their opinion or/and to that of their employer. Perhaps this is not only a phenomenon of our times. Balzac already wrote in one of his novels on “mental brothels” and meant exactly that kind of “journalism” which determines the main media until today. Since years WuG is regularly questioning that kind of “journalism” by singling out articles, reports, interviews in other media and questioning them with statistics, theory and logic.
The present reporting on Greece crowns this negative development. You nearly find any fact based questioning of politicians or any empirically based article on how the crisis, e.g. unemployment and debt, in Greece has developed since austerity has been introduced. You nearly find any reporting on the concrete suffering of the people, too. You also nearly find any reporting on political alternatives. Nearly everyone is following the political agenda set by the leading political representatives, who do not care at all about the victims of their policy or even the most basic democratic values, e.g. not influencing a democratic referendum like that which takes place today in Greece. The result of this, apart from incorrect information and a lack of diversity in analysis and opinion, is that politicians and organisations like the EU Commission, the IMF or the ECB are not only not seriously questioned, they also not forced to explain themselves, to legitimate their policy, to argue. What can undermine democracy more than this kind of “journalism” which behaves, as Balzac has put it, like “mental brothels”?
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