Richard David Precht and Harald Welzer presented their new book "The Fourth Estate - How Majority Opinion is Made, Even If It Isn't One" to the public last week - as best as they could: More than full-page interviews in the mainstream media "Stern" and "Zeit" weren't included, how loudly their book will be hushed up when it comes out next week is not yet foreseeable.

But one thing is certain: Whatever you say, you can only agree with the two thinkers - be it by agreeing with their diagnosis of the "unanimity of published opinion";

or by contradicting them, demonstrating intolerance for the dissenting opinions they deplore.

When in doubt, they consider any objection to their theses to be “decontextualization” and any confirmation only to be “feigned pluralism of opinion”.

The appearance of Precht and Welzer seems almost like a hoax, an experiment intended to test how receptive what they call quality media is now to under-complex indignation, as long as it comes with a certain prominence.

They're probably sitting at some regulars' table right now and are happy that all of their bluster was allowed to pass as a serious contribution to the debate.

The fact that no one noticed all the contradictions should be a reason to celebrate: the blanket complaint that "the media (...) attacked those who pointed out the consequences of the war in Ukraine."

Or the thesis that journalists in the established media orientate themselves on the applause of their colleagues and the moral minorities in the social networks, even though they come under so much pressure in the "battle for attention" that it would be much more lucrative to express the resentment of the to serve "people out there".

The authors' biggest coup, however, is probably that they cleverly smuggled their dissenting opinions about the task of journalists past the media controls by disguising them as an irrefutable principle.

"Journalism has an integration function for democracy," says Welzer, as if the media were a kind of parliament whose duty it is to reflect public opinion;

as if publicity was still a privilege;

as if not every opponent of the war could post their opinion in their own Facebook group.

But how do Precht and Welzer know that the majority opinion differs from the "published opinion"?

From the subway, which, in contrast to their colleagues in the "media elite", they obviously use passionately, or from surveys, which, like a good sophist, they trust as opinion-forming instruments only as long as they are useful to them.

After all, they explain, we now live in a "mediocracy."

In this, they warn, politicians would be “strongly driven” by opinion polls.