Eactually this text should start with a top gag about Christian Lindner. But many of our readers should at least feel sorry for him and his FDP – as a dependently employed author, you prefer to hold back if you don’t want to risk complaints with the boss or the cancellation of advertisements by sports car manufacturers. The planned column, in which Wolfgang Kubicki and Silvana Koch-Netzin would certainly have appeared, would have revolved around physics and its connections to politics. A friend had already pointed us to a Wikipedia page called “List of well-known physicists in other professions” (Lafontaine! Brian May! Jean Pütz!), but professional ethics dictate that you only write about things you know about. So: not physics, not politics, not “bugging”, but journalism.
Journalism has never been subjected to such attacks as it is today. They come from Putin (paper price!), from the subway (Harald Welzer), from crime novels (it would be worth a doctoral thesis to problematize the representation of the press in the “crime scene”), yes: from journalism itself the colleague Harald Martenstein in “Tichys Insight”, which is famous for its trustworthiness, he does not believe “that I can ever trust anyone in this business again”. He even finds the opening of a “night bar” (not “nude bar”, as a fact check revealed) more solid than becoming a journalist.
To be honest, there are all sorts of reasons for suspicion, the word “list” is not in the word “journalist” for nothing – although, as Lindner will know, there is a place on Sylt called List, and it’s actually quite okay. But we don’t want to divert attention here at all, we want to face the criticism, also to refute the accusation that journalists consider themselves sacrosanct.
A second allegation is that journalists suffer from overconfidence. Good point. There are said to be editors of “People Magazines” who are heavily in debt because they think they are mentally in the league of the objects of their reporting, but the account balance is not keeping up. Accusation number three: the journalists are not always concerned with the matter at hand. Here, too, transparency requires you to be honest. Some colleagues, for example, are supposed to tackle the government just so hard that they become aware of them, but not harder, because they hope to be appointed government spokesman, keyword account balance.
Accusation number four: moral questionability. Not completely outlandish either. How many do you think of the noble quills that just went to press in massive page three stories on September 8th ended the day devastated? Many! And not because the Queen had just died, but because her massive page three stories flew out of the paper because of the obituaries. You should also ask the friends or partners of journalists. If a top gag slips out at the breakfast table, it will definitely be in the newspaper shortly afterwards, of course without naming the author, not to mention royalties.
The American writer Joan Didion wrote: “Writers always deliver someone to the knife.” When the writer Ferdinand von Schirach was confronted with this in the “SZ-Magazin”, he replied: “I’m afraid that applies more to journalism. Didion was a journalist as well as a writer. I remember in one of her big reports about Los Angeles she described how she saw a neglected baby in a drug apartment building and, to her horror, was delighted – her story now had a perfect ending.” It probably would have been better , Didion simply thought up the neglected baby for the report, especially for the baby. It wouldn’t have been entirely journalistic, of course, you know that since the Relotius case, but you can’t please everyone anyway.
Speaking of the perfect ending: every good text returns to the beginning. Therefore, we conclude with the conclusion of the planned physics gloss: “Better not to react than wrong.”
#Fraktur #Journalism #character #test