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Perhaps a disclosure at the beginning: I am not necessarily a friend of the “Tagesspiegel”.
Last year a runaway employee of the newspaper openly announced a hit piece against me on Twitter and asked readers to send him private information about my time in Berlin 16 (!) Years ago.
I've long since forgotten myself!
That was probably not particularly productive, because the contribution never came.
Conversely, I have also written about the - meanwhile former - “Tagesspiegel” editor Matthias Meisner and his proximity to the Amadeu Antonio Foundation of the former Stasi IM Anetta Kahane, which caused quite a stir.
In addition, I am heavily burdened, because I know some of the marginalized actors in this topic privately and therefore leave them out, although they can nonetheless be used as examples.
And because the subject is hideous, I will show my friendly tomcat Balu here to calm things down.
Source: Don Alphonso
Adorable, isn't it?
I look so happy when I write.
To get to the actual topic: Of course there are attempts to influence journalists.
During my time in Berlin it was so common that today I don't feel like doing quotes or interviews at all: the politician turns it around as he needs it, the journalist frames it the way he likes it.
It goes without saying that there is freedom of the press on the one hand and various means by which one can influence the results of reporting on the other.
It is not for nothing that influencers are so popular in the industry who sell exactly what they are told.
Of course, there is also the intervention of a politician with the superiors to get better press, or professors are rounded up who write an armored letter to the boss because one made fun of a genderist in a contribution.
All of this takes place in secret, and most of the time it is already clear to the media that if they are bought by a Haffenloher or brought into line, they will no longer get out of it.
This explains why the CSU press spokesman had to leave Strepp in 2012 after trying to optimize his party on the public broadcasters.
In my opinion, this is progress, by the way, because anyone who knows the bad old days of the CSU state party also knows how brutal the intervention was at the time: the CSU wanted the head of the Munich correspondent for the owner of our local newspaper because he was even worse than him at that time still angry "Spiegel" wrote.
Source: Don Alphonso
When such scuffles arose, there was a big hello, politicians were presented as filzocrats and their henchmen dragged into the public eye without any fundamental change in the business between companionship and mortal enmity - I did something like that at MDR, who sold a left-wing politician as a poor apartment hunter, or there was this story with the Green MP Monika Lazar, who criticized a millet mill as a normal customer as the ZDF key witness.
The worst that could happen to a staunch journalist was being locked out of interviews and information, and politicians retaliated by favoring others.
But the open confrontation between the media, journalists and some politician washed ashore from the Internet, who simply bullyed around with baseless accusations because something did not suit him: This is rather new.
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Niema Movassat is a member of the Bundestag for the Left Party and, given his participation in an anti-Semitic demonstration in Essen, a well-known activist in the field of migration policy.
He's trying to drag a journalist into the dirt here.
In the past, something like this was unthinkable: In times before the great influence of social media channels, politicians would have used balanced journalists to whom they passed information and recommendations exclusively in order to influence the public image.
But this old-fashioned method is becoming increasingly obsolete.
Journalists and the media are attacked directly and with the aim of discrediting, in the expectation that unwanted texts will be omitted.
The victims can be chosen at random, and the methods are now only half hidden.
The point in time when this turning point was tangible was the fall of the "Westfalen-Blatt".
In the provincial newspaper, the question was asked whether children should go ahead as flower girls at a gay wedding if those involved were not convinced, and the author, active as a counselor, wrote that in such cases one should seek clarification.
A provincial newspaper makes a provincial topic, but it was unlucky that the article also made it to the Internet and there to a certain Charlotte Obermeier, at that time with the Green Youth.
Ms. Obermeier, who worked as a personal assistant for the Green MP and gay activist Volker Beck, instigated a shit storm against the author and the paper.
As a result, the medium buckled and no longer extended the contract with the author.
At that time, Volker Beck expressly and publicly thanked Ms. Obermeier for the campaign.
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And, as already mentioned, she occupied himself in the Bundestag office until he himself stumbled upon a scandal involving a certain substance he had found and was no longer represented by his party in 2017.
While Volker Beck disappeared into relative insignificance, Ms. Obermeier made a career and is now financed by the green parliamentary group - and therefore ultimately also by the taxpayer - as a “social media coordinator”.
You can see that the smear campaign against the author did not harm her.
Even now she is back with retweets when a shitstorm goes against two articles by the “Tagesspiegel” editor Fatina Keilani, who formulated her reservations about anti-racism as a business model using a few examples and described what she said a week later the heated mob on the net.
People like Ms. Obermeier, the ZDF employee Mario Sixtus involved in the Hatz or the inciting "Spiegel" author Margarete Stokowski are otherwise quick to accuse other people of racism if they want to teach people with migration experience from above, but here a "Tagesspiegel" author did not express herself as requested.
And that's why a mud fight has been raging for over a week, in which cheese-white, purely German men let their sexism and hatred of women who think differently run free and even demand apologies.
Here is a member of the Greens in Berlin:
Source: Don Alphonso
By the way, the man calls himself a “feminist” in his self-description and may have understood the incongruence because the tweet has since been deleted.
Other activists then went straight to the point and advised their readers, for example, to cancel their subscription to the “Tagesspiegel” - which, by the way, was liked by several employees of public broadcasters:
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Kilic is one of those more controversial activists working to introduce “anti-Muslim racism” into the debates.
Appeals for resignation are of course also subject to freedom of expression, even if employees of the public service broadcaster otherwise react allergically as soon as others even reject the increases in the democracy tax for themselves.
In any case, a colorful mixture of left-wing extremists, activists, NGO employees, media people - including some authors of the "Tagesspiegel" themselves - and politicians who demanded consequences from the "Tagesspiegel" rose up against Keilani.
This has already been achieved in the case of the “SZ”, when an author there was not over-euphoric about Igor Levit's piano skills and questioned his rude speeches on the Internet.
The same mob is now after Keilani and the “Tagesspiegel”, and there are increasing indications that such attacks are being coordinated by a group.
Since I've been dealing with it, informers have bitterly reported my tweets in series.
Others who liked Ms. Keilani's texts now also have to deal with the mob themselves.
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Two people particularly stood out in the rioting on the net, for whom it is not at all clear at first glance who they are and what drives them.
First of all there is Krsto Lazarevic, a journalist with a focus on the Balkans, and often for the left-wing radical newspaper Jungle World from the anti-German spectrum, formerly also working for the WELT.
Lazarevic has been working on Keilani for days and, as a highlight, unearthed an eleven-year-old contribution by the author, in which she dealt with the theses of Thilo Sarrazin, who at the time was still a board member of the Bundesbank and not a bestselling author.
At that time, Sarrazin had made controversial statements to the magazine "Lettre", which Keilani did not flatly refuse with the indignation that was usual at the time.
At that time the book “Germany is abolishing itself” did not yet exist, eleven years ago nobody could have known what was coming, but Lazarevic still uses this eleven-year-old contribution to connect Keilani with the “racist Sarrazin”.
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Who is this Krsto Lazarevic, where does he have all the time to research an author, to construct such references, to spread them on Twitter and to participate in the character assassination?
His profile on Twitter says little about this, it just says that he would work in the European Parliament: “Working @Europarl_EN”.
This is of course a top reference that he claims for himself, but the reality of Krsto Lazarevic is different.
He doesn't work directly for the European Parliament, but, as a short research shows, as an employee of a member of parliament.
Specifically, Lazarevic is the press spokesman for the green member of the European Parliament, Erik Marquardt - only he acts on the Internet without this information, which one would actually have to expect from parliamentarians in the case of press employees financed with taxpayers' money.
Because his boss Erik Marquardt is an expert on migration within the Greens and, as an activist, was responsible for the “Civilfleet” project.
The project began in 2018 with great media attention and then failed spectacularly: Funds were gone, the ship could not go on rescue missions.
When the scandal became known in September 2019, the activist Marquardt had already entered parliament on a wave of popularity for the Greens.
Marquardt is undoubtedly one of those who benefit from the issue of anti-racism, his work in the EU Parliament often consists of the scourge of "racist" EU policies - and his personal press spokesman, paid with taxpayers' money, is covertly participating in a dirty campaign against a journalist on the Internet, which deals with exactly this topic.
Lazarevic is therefore not an isolated case:
Source: Don Alphonso
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Here a Sarah - supported by thousands of likes and almost 400 retweets - wants the excesses against Keilani and the “Tagesspiegel” to be viewed as “criticism” and not as a shit storm.
She is annoyed that journalists use the second term.
Shortly before that, this Sarah retweeted an activist Jasmina Kuhnke herself, who, under the Twitter name Quattromilf, had asked the “Tagesspiegel” whether he wanted to literally “mess with her” - the text by Keilani was “unbelievable”.
Before that, this Sarah had also indirectly said to Keilani that she was an “old, white man”: Normally, such an assignment to people with a migration background is considered racism.
This Sarah, from whom one only learns in the self-description that "there used to be more tinsel", has with this - meanwhile deleted again, but over a week visible - insult behind Kuhnke and her "criticism" with the words "Fuck off" posed.
Source: Don Alphonso
Well, as research shows, this Sarah is an employee of the Bundestag member of the Left Party, Stefan Liebich - and thus a party friend of Niema Movassat, who attacks the “Tagesspiegel” and Keilani directly.
Specifically, according to Liebich's website, "Sarah" worked in the area of "anti-discrimination" and is now part of his team for social media - including Twitter, where she attacks Keilani and the "Tagesspiegel".
In her second article, Keilani warned against precisely these structures and described them as a threat to press freedom.
One cannot help but oblige her: the key actors in the character assassination of her person live on taxpayers' money, sit as members of parliamentarians, obviously have a lot of time to fight critical journalists - and do so online, without their role and their connections to representatives of the Make legislative public.
Freedom of the press is first and foremost a task of the state and its organs to guarantee the free circulation of the word - here, however, employees of state organs are covertly fighting to ensure that Ms. Keilani can no longer represent this point of view.
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Any differentiation has been lost in view of left-wing racial studies from the rabble on Twitter to Stefan Liebich's office, and the message is obvious: Those who deviate from the desired corridor of opinion are attacked by politicians, sometimes covered up by paid politicians, sometimes openly slandered, and the mob on the net will do the rest. There are currently a lot of allegations that are being constructed in order to destroy Fatina Keilani and her reputation: Of course this is an attack on the freedom of the press, and the left and the Greens obviously have no inhibitions either to operate with people who are employed in the area of press and social media.
As in the case of the CSU spokesman, these parties could get rid of it by firing the staff in question and clearly showing the rest that such tactics are reprehensible.
The covert attackers on the free reporting are now financed with public funds, and the consequences would have been inevitable in the past.
But after those involved have the impression that they are defending the right thing with their “anti-racism”, the consequences will probably remain manageable.
These are the lessons of the past few years: There are rules for everyone, and many break them because their political and media networks ensure that they can do it with impunity.
Of course, this mob extortion has an impact on the average journalist's willingness to expose themselves to this topic in uncertain times.
It is about intimidation and the suppression of uncomfortable reporting so that the beneficiaries of this system still have their warm office tomorrow and can decide on alleged racism without contradiction.
The aim of the campaign, and should the mob now be successful at the "Tagesspiegel", it will go against other, remaining brave like Martenstein next week.