Summary of the discussions at the Südwestdeutschen Rundfunk
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- Created on Sunday, 31 January 2016 15:47
- Written by austria
To my mind, the most important finding of the debate is that the economy and governments indeed try to influence journalists and the media in general. To exemplify how companies try to bias a reporter´s opinion, Mr. Ladwig told us about how a multinational agriculture corporation against whom he made a report wanted to invite him to a stay at a luxury hotel where they would proof that the allegations against them were wrong. He also added that this was not the only offer of its kind.
He stated that it is the duty of every journalist to report as unbiasedly as possible which also means that you have to use information from reliable sources. It is often difficult for a reporter to check the reliability of these sources due to a lack of time. With the growth in popularity of modern media, such as the internet, a culture of so called “immediatism” developed, which means that the news have to appear online immediately after they happened. Because of the high competition in the media sector journalists often have to decide which source of information they use. If different sources suggest contradictory information, the reporter has to speculate which description is more likely to be true. This development was crucial to the introduction of the German term “Lügenpresse”, which means a press full of lies, owing to the fact that these speculations are sometimes not right, which leads to the media reporting wrong information about a certain event.
Sometimes information is withheld in order not to cause panic, e.g. the sexual harassment of hundreds of women was not mentioned in the report about new year´s eve of the Cologne police, but such practices only promote the distrust in the media.
To conclude, journalists must report unbiasedly and they should only use genuine information in order not to misinform the public. Furthermore, the people must be informed about all ongoing events, even if they are unsettling, to proof that the accusation that the media is trying to manipulate the consumers by spreading lies is wrong.
By Karl Reininger