On the Constant, Unrelenting and Unhinged Anti-Trump Propaganda of the German Media
A few days ago, some important Twitter personalities noticed that Germans vastly overestimate Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the U.S. presidency:
According to that very same poll, 83% of Germans believe that a Trump victory would be “rather bad” for Germany:
Pollsters periodically ask Germans which American presidential candidate they would support, were they in a position to vote. Last July, 79% said they would vote for Kamala Harris; only 13% would vote for Donald Trump. The numbers are typical: Barack Obama claimed 71% support in a similar poll from 2008 and Hillary Clinton enjoyed 82% support in 2016. Right now, Green voters split 99% for Harris, Social Democrat voters 92%, nominally centre-right CDU/CSU voters 89%, market-liberal FDP voters 85%, and voters for the old-school leftist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht party 52%. Across the entire German political landscape, only Alternative für Deutschland voters would support Trump by a thin majority of 51%. Even here, one-in-four are undecided, and the remaining one-in-four would vote for Harris.
You might be tempted to argue that differing national interests explain this, but I don’t think that argument works. It’s far from obvious that a Harris administration would further the interests of the German people. The war in Ukraine and the associated bombing of Nord Stream, for example, were both enthusiastically supported by Joe Biden specifically, and they proved catastrophic for the Federal Republic. What is really going on here is much subtler: Many Germans know English, but consuming foreign-language material is a pain and relatively few have any direct contact with Trump’s debates, his speeches or sympathetic English-language reporting. We learn about American presidential campaigns primarily through our media, and Germany has a vast state-adjacent media industrial complex in much the same way that the United States has a vast state-adjacent military industrial complex.
And: The German media industrial complex is truly fanatical when it comes to hating Trump. We are basically conducting a real-world experiment to determine how much media manipulation can achieve when deployed en masse against a low-information, credulous population. My American readers will say that their own media is heavily biased, but German media is vastly, vastly more extreme.
NiUS sums up the tenor of German political coverage well: The German press have openly favoured Democratic Party presidential candidates for decades; they are invariably portrayed as wise, forward-looking beacons (if not bacons) of hope for the future. Republican candidates since Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, are ridiculed as dangerous, incompetent and stupid. Trump merely added new hysteria and urgency to these old, long-standing tropes. A 2017 paper by Thomas Patterson at Harvard University looked at European coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in office in the BBC, the Financial Times and the ARD – Germany’s oldest public media broadcaster. The BBC covered Trump negatively 75% of the time and the Financial Times covered him negatively 86% of the time, but the ARD were by far the most extreme, directing fully 98% of their Trump stories against the forty-fifth president. In their absolute anti-Trumpism, ARD outpaced even American media like CNN and NBC (92% negative), to say nothing of more “serious” press like the New York Times and the Washington Post (87% and 83% negative, respectively).
Even that is only a partial picture, because you have to remember that there is no major opposition media in Germany at all. The newsweekly Junge Freiheit, for example – which covers Trump about as sympathetically as Fox News – has a circulation of less than 30,000. It is all wall-to-wall anti-Trump screeching all the time here in the Federal Republic.
Emblematic of our Pravda-tier press coverage were the initial reactions to the catastrophic Trump-Biden debate on 27 June. Immediately afterwards, the ARD news service tagesschau ran a story that totally ignored Biden’s obvious cognitive failings in that confrontation. “Sharp Words at the First TV Debate,” they declared ahead of a story that played up at every opportunity Biden’s attacks on Trump. Only later, after the real news became too big to hide, were our impartial public broadcasters compelled to add a section admitting that “In addition to the substantive issues, the attention of observers was drawn to the candidates’ demeanour.” Here they wrote that “Biden stuttered, lost his train of thought and spoke in a weak voice,” and regretted that the president’s “weak performance overshadowed even Trump’s … which was peppered with mistakes and blatant lies.”
The calculated misreporting continues through every story that might potentially be to the disadvantage of Kamala Harris. Her train-wreck of an interview with Fox News was praised by tagesschau as an appearance where she “distanced herself from Biden,” something (as we saw on Friday) that she absolutely failed to do. Nor did German readers ever learn the slightest thing about Tim Walz’s bizarrely poor performance in his debate against J.D. Vance. We had only article after article after article praising the “civility” of the encounter. You can understand, in this media environment, why most Germans believe that Harris is poised to win. It’s inconceivable why anybody wouldn’t cast their vote for her.
There is still another angle that my American readers might miss. Political reporting in the United States is often much more raw and aggressive than ours in Germany. Here, only Alternative für Deutschland are ever openly vilified; all other political parties and mainstream politicians are generally treated with an overt, suffocating politeness even when they are criticised. Donald Trump, however – the once and perhaps future president of the United States – is daily denounced as a liar. “Trump’s Category Five Hurricane Lies” (Spiegel), “Trump’s Five Lies In Case He Loses the Election” (FAZ), “Why Do So Many Believe Trump’s Lies?” (RND) are just three of literally hundreds of headlines I could compile. Stories insinuating that Trump is a fascist are also common. “Trump’s Dangerous Game with Fascism” is an example that Rheinische Post published just a few days ago. Our journalists particularly enjoy unearthing Americans to guest-author these pieces. In this article from September, Die Zeit got the renowned lunatic (and journalism professor, but I repeat myself) Jeff Jarvis to denounce American media for “refusing to recognise the fascism that is at our door.” (The self-congratulatory implication of an article like this appearing in a German newspaper is that our press has been vastly more forthright in this area.) Germanophone journalists are especially enamoured of the clown “fascism expert” Jason Stanley, who is happy to tell anyone who asks that the United States is experiencing a period of “neo-fascism,” that America is no longer a democracy and that the upcoming elections there are likely to be the last.
Negative Trump coverage in Germany is much more unidimensional than it is in the Anglosphere. In English-language papers, Trump is routinely attacked not only as a dangerous aspiring dictator, but also (somewhat incoherently) as an embarrassingly incompetent clown and a source of unintentional comedy. He is, in short, both a political threat and also a tabloid diversion. In Germany, we get only the hysteria. As Der Spiegel themselves reported in a guest-authored retrospective of their own Trump coverage: “Fear is the dominant theme … The threat of civil war, chaos and destruction, the whipped-up mob – that is the emotional picture that emerges from Trump reporting.”
Many different cultural currents coincide to create this bizarre and unhinged phenomenon. Much Trump coverage in the German press has the same tone as our stories about spree shootings in the United States: They are an opportunity for a disarmed and subjugated European client state to tut-tut about how crass, wrong and violent everything at the centre of empire is, and how much more adult we are over here in Europe, with our restrictive gun laws and our vastly more mature political class. The craven desire to maintain this frame also explains domestic hysteria about the AfD; every point they gain in the polls threatens to upend this flattering if ridiculous narrative. I also think that the general political consensus which seized Germany during the long chancellorship of Angela Merkel has proven stifling for our journalists and politicians alike. It’s almost as fun to agree as it is to hate, to denounce and to decry, and Trump is a convenient, foreign target for our elite to oppose. Should Trump win a second term, things will become very awkward for them.
Harris is another childless open borders fanatic like Merkel. Sad that Germans would simp for her instead of Drumpf, who has German heritage. Goebbels would be proud of the German and American corporate media propagandists.
I think “Der Spiegel” is quite the appropriate name for the mag. They look in the mirror and see their own radical ideas and then claim it’s really the other side. Classic psychological projection.