Why does the German media spread fake news about the United States?

This week Die Welt, Germany’s most intellectual daily, unexpectedly departed from the official German media line on the United States. Inspired by President Trump’s unflattering characterisation of Baltimore, the paper actually sent its correspondent to visit the city and talk to some of its neglected residents — neglected, that is, by their chosen leaders, all of whom, like most of the city’s population, are African-American. 

Faced with this unpleasantly (for the Die Welt) counter-intuitive finding, the headline of the article read “Trump is Partly Right”. One might ask what part, exactly, was partly wrong? Is there only part of a rat problem in Baltimore? Why did the most recent mayor of the city have to resign? How has Congressman Elijah Cummings become a millionaire by channelling public funds into a supposed charity led by . . . you guessed it! Mrs Cummings. But one mustn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Congratulations to Die Welt for having discovering the world isn’t flat after all. Just this once.

Americans who live in Germany and are able to read the German press on a daily basis are constantly discovering an America they didn’t know existed. It’s the America of the German eco-leftist imagination.

Let me offer just a few tidbits.

Some time ago a young man in the US was given an outrageously mild sentence for attempting to rape a young woman. The judge claimed that since the boy came from a “good family” he didn’t want to ruin his future. This was the opportunity for Munich’s liberal daily, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, to run a lead editorial on class justice in the United States. The paper failed to note that the day afterwards the public of the community in question was so outraged that a grassroots movement to recall the judge spread like wildfire. I haven’t followed the case since then, but neither has the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It scored its point. End of story.

Not long ago, too, President Trump challenged Senator Elizabeth Warren, currently running as a leading Democratic candidate for president, to take a DNA test to establish whether or not she was, as she claimed, of American Indian origin. The lady fell into the trap, took the test, and proved to be no more an Indian than President Trump. Nonetheless, Focus, one of Germany’s most important news magazines, reported that the senator had humiliated the president by proving his claims to be bogus. This was precisely the opposite of the truth.

And then we have the case of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. The majority of voters in this small rural community voted for President Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Der Spiegel, the country’s most important and prestigious news magazine, sent one of their prize-winning journalists to Fergus Falls to describe this den of racism, xenophobia and climate change denial for the delectation of its readers. Alas, after the article appeared (very conveniently on the magazine’s English website) two residents of the town, neither of whom had voted for President Trump, wrote a corrective article, disputing its findings point by point. Several residents said they were misquoted, or that circumstances about their lives were complete fabrications. And that the lead allegation of the article, that a sign welcoming people to the town also carried underneath the legend “Mexicans Not Wanted Here”, was a total falsehood. There is no such sign. The magazine was forced to print a retraction — but only because this time it was caught.

It’s worth asking just why so much misinformation about the US appears so often in the German media. There is no simple answer, but I would like to offer three possible ones.

First of all, as a race, journalists are the laziest bunch ever put on God’s green earth. In their reporting on the US, very often all that German journalists do is to repeat what they read in the US media, never bothering to check whether that source is a reliable one — which, of course, it often isn’t. Once again congratulations to Die Welt for having put the effort into finding out the facts in the case of Baltimore.

Second, after living in this country for almost a decade, I find that the German public psyche is a combination of three things: self-hatred, self-pity, and self-righteousness. While ordinary Germans, like ordinary people everywhere, have other things on their minds than deep philosophical and moral questions, the German media acts as a kind of moral censor, constantly ringing the bell to remind the Germans how awful they are (or at least, how awful they used to be) with the comforting counter-example of — guess who? The US, former beau ideal of postwar Germany.

Third, for a very long time the Germans haven’t had to think about major geopolitical issues. They’ve had Uncle Sam to pay the bill and take the heat, while German politicians and media people (I am looking at you, Stern) could posture. This era may be coming to an end, and I am not sure the German establishment is ready for it. 

A recent edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung carried a long piece on the front page about German resistance to US efforts to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. But be careful, dear friends. The US is now energy self-sufficient; Germany famously is not. One of these days we may just decide to throw in the towel and leave the game in the Middle East. As a matter of fact, there is a growing convergence of left- and right-wing thinking on US foreign policy, as exemplified by the founding of the Quincy Institute in Boston and Washington DC, of which we shall soon hear much more. Now this would be an interesting article for the German media, since it has important implications for German foreign and security policy. But I am not holding my breath. 

Mark Falcoff is a writer and translator living in Munich.