The famous sentence that editor-in-chief Rudolf Augstein proclaimed as the motto for “Spiegel” in 1961 is more popular today than ever before: journalists should “say what is.” Unfortunately, today it is used in such a shortened way that it grotesquely turns what Augstein meant by it on its head. Because Augstein's dictum is usually interpreted as a request to stick to facts and to base reporting purely on one's own opinion.
The motto today serves as an argument against “attitude journalism”, in the name of the attitude that acts as if the closest thing to reality is by speaking only of its most obvious manifestations. And then accepts - or relies on - that the prevailing conditions and general resentment will finish the ideological job.
Augstein was explicitly concerned with the opposite, namely with “helping to bring to light a truth that lies beneath the smooth surface of popular opinion” and, he continued, “to grasp this necessary truth in an unassailable way (…), a truth that the established leaders and opinion makers have so far avoided out of convenience and selfishness.” His goal was anything but objectivity (perhaps because he knew how problematic the term was): “Saying what is,” he wrote, was “the only way for the journalist to change reality.”
This false understanding of real journalism is still surprisingly intact even in the age of deepfakes and omnipresent opinion manipulation. The media still approaches world events with the routines of news retelling, as if today we don't have to put every sentence in quotation marks or shake every picture three times. How fatal this is could not only be seen from the example of the reporting on the events in Ceuta; but it's particularly good about it. Images of the “mass rush” on the Spanish exclave in Morocco have been running across the screens for days, along with a few facts and figures that give such a limited view of the events that one has to ask whether the reporting is just spreading the resonating narrative or is trying to produce it itself. To put it with Augstein, many media outlets initially had no idea what “is” in Ceuta. And when the circumstances that led to the mass border crossing gradually became known, the false images that tens of thousands of gullible, hopeless refugees fell for, they often remain just a footnote.
Parroting what others say
Instead of pretending to say what is, you could have asked right from the start what you were seeing. And why. Why did this rush of crowds happen so suddenly? Why only a month after the Spanish court ruling that supposedly opened the doors to Europe for them? Why are 22 EU leaders accusing the Spanish government of causing chaos through measures to legalize migration, when legalization would be the best way to combat illegal migration? Why were the images spread so quickly by those who profit politically from the panic and who otherwise have little interest in Europe? Why did the Moroccan police remain so inactive? And why did Morocco name a highway to independence-seeking Western Sahara after Donald Trump? Not mentioning what's behind it, parroting what others say - that's also disinformation.
But instead of doing their job, the media continues to spread images without comment that they should know are weapons. But the neutrality requirement prohibits comments, at least as long as they are not marked with warnings and locked in their own departments. And while you're still surrendering to the images, you're shaking your head as you talk about the stupid Arab boys who are putting their lives at risk because of a rumor on Tiktok.
A rare exception in recent days has been the British podcast “The Rest is Politics” with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. It didn't occur to them to say what was happening. Instead, they titled their episode on the topic with a question that many German colleagues have not yet thought of: “Who benefits from the migration crisis in Ceuta?”
