Ahen the authors Richard David Precht and Harald Welzer published their book “The Fourth Estate” last autumn, in which they complained that the German “leading media” reported on the Ukraine war too one-sidedly, it was not only the lack of empirical evidence for their Thesis criticized; but also this. “Not without reason,” Welzer now concedes in an article for the magazine “Neue Rundschau” and announces: The receipt “can now be delivered later”. (The study is here available for free.)
Together with the consulting company Blue Ocean Semantic Web, whose boss Leo Keller is named as a co-author, Welzer evaluated 107,000 texts “from the leading media” and 13.5 million tweets from the period between February 1, 2022 and January 31, 2023. And of course this elaborate content analysis, whose data was “segmented, categorized and indexed” with “a powerful AI engine” and all the bells and whistles, deserves to be analyzed in appropriate detail and checked for any contradictions, for example those how it is possible that articles that have only appeared after the book can prove the theses of the book. But we can keep it short: it is no more than the caricature of a study.
The lack of international experts
Where the article not only repeats the accusations from the book, it criticizes the absence of international voices in the German discourse. And tries to substantiate this using a randomly assembled group of five international experts (Ivan Krastev, Gideon Rachman, David Remnick, Keith Gessen and Ranjan Nair) who have hardly appeared in the German media – allegedly they were only mentioned in 20 texts. Oddly enough, the completely puzzling list of more present experts does not include a frequently consulted expert such as Timothy Snyder, who, in a short sample in our press archive, came up with 160 mentions during the period under investigation, nor someone like the much-quoted Australian ex-General Mick Ryan, who there delivers at least 47 hits.
Despite the hardly comprehensible methodology, one could agree with the notification of defects, felt, so to speak: who would want to dispute the German self-referentiality. But how she is supposed to prove the distortion of the discourse in favor of a bellicose elite remains a complete mystery. But wait a minute, the data researchers have at least found one thing in terms of content: In the context of the debate about arms deliveries, they observed a “uniformity of reporting”, albeit mainly in January after the publication of the book. At this point, however, “discussion about arms deliveries” reportedly increased significantly, but mention of “risks of escalation” had oddly decreased compared to October. The Third World War was practically hushed up!
The article omits which terms or word clusters the researchers were looking for, as well as the explanation of the methodology. Apparently it doesn’t matter what opinions can be derived from the use of certain buzzwords, i.e. whether the articles dealing with the “use of nuclear weapons” warned against it or described the threat as scaremongering. It is also worth noting where the data that Welzer and Keller oppose this “tendency” come from. On Twitter, the bots counted, the discussion of “escalation risks” did not decrease in January 2023, but increased massively. Twitter apparently serves as a kind of control group for representative public opinion. Welzer has apparently already forgotten that the service in “The Fourth Estate” was still part of the “direct media”, the “habitat” of “reach or excitement journalism”.
However, one gap is particularly noticeable in this study: The list of experts who were interviewed particularly frequently about the Ukraine war even lacks the names of Precht and Welzer themselves both even renounce all vanity.
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