Report_Issue 1/2009 - Jubiläum/ 20 Jahre Mauerfall

Corruption
is not a cliché
“Students at the Moscow Lomonossov University recently
presented me with an analysis of the contents of German
newspapers. The result: Russia comes off rather badly,
except in the area of sport. The analysis is without doubt
accurate. However, still worse than Russia’s image is that of
Germany in the German media. The images of Mr George W.
Bush, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, to name but a
few, were dreadful. And practically annihilating was the media
image of the Chancellor of German unity, Helmut Kohl.
Why is that so? Because it is not primarily our task to communicate
radiant images. For that purpose, governments,
companies and associations have PR teams. Our task is to
indicate when something is threatening to go wrong in politics,
the economy, culture or society. That is the real function
of ‘critical journalism’, a term that everybody is so keen
on using today: politicians, businessmen, football coaches,
theatre directors, the nuclear power lobby, environmental
activists and many others too. Only when one’s own affairs
are concerned does this argument no longer hold, then one
wants ‘success stories’.
But is it really necessary, my young colleague from Moscow
asked me, that in literally every second article about Russia
the cliché about ‘corruption’ has to occur. ‘If that is a
cliché, then did the new president and the presidents before
him speak about clichés?’ I asked in return. Yes, there
is also corruption in Germany, for example in municipal
— Werner D’Inka —
building departments, or for many years at Siemens, that
is what we report anyway. Yet the fact that money is paid
and received for university degrees, or that parents can buy
their only son’s way out of having to do military service is
not an invention of the media, but everyday reality in many
countries of Eastern Europe. And anyone who has ever got
caught by the Russian or Ukrainian traffic control police,
not to mention customs, knows the unofficial scale of fines.
So where is the positive side? The well-known papers or
television channels do report economic successes, but evidently
the business pages are not read by media critics.
Regardless of that, there are certainly many things that
could be improved about the standard of reporting on
Eastern Europe. In many cases (like foreign affairs reporting
in general) the capital city is, of necessity, overemphasized.
It would be desirable for the correspondents to have
more time and opportunity to travel through the country,
although that should not be taken as criticism of my colleagues,
but rather as a question of personnel and resources,
even in the big newspapers and broadcasting stations.”
Werner D’Inka has been the editor of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” for many years now, since 2005 he has
also been a member of its board of publishers. Furthermore, he has devoted himself to promoting Russian-German
media relations, is the honorary co-director of the Free Russian-German Institute of Journalism at the University of
Rostov on the Don, and is also on the committee of the Network for Easten Europe Reporting, called “n-ost”.
Published in “Report” in October 2008 (online)
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