Gloves Off in German Media Scramble (original) (raw)
Advertisement
- March 13, 2011
PARIS — A plagiarism scandal cost Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg his job as defense minister of Germany. It also laid bare a scramble for influence in the German news media in the post-Gutenberg era, in which the Internet has usurped the primacy of the printing press.
On the eve of Mr. Guttenberg’s resignation this month, after allegations that he had lifted portions of his doctoral dissertation from other sources, the biggest newsmagazine in Germany, Der Spiegel, published a cover article branding Bild, the biggest newspaper in the country and an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Guttenberg, as “arsonists.”
The magazine tut-tutted over Bild’s campaign to keep Mr. Guttenberg in his job, criticized what it called ethical lapses in the paper’s reporting and complained about its opposition to immigration and the financial bailout of Greece. “The newspaper claims the role of a leading German medium, yet in fact it is taking on the role of a right-wing populist party of the kind that does not exist on the German political scene,” Der Spiegel wrote in a 12-page report by seven journalists.
Der Spiegel’s article has set tongues racing in newsrooms across Germany, where an informal détente had governed relations among media organizations in recent years.
Germans remain avid readers, and the country’s newspapers and magazines suffered less than their counterparts elsewhere during the global economic crisis. Meanwhile, ideological rifts between left and right, which used to divide German publishers, have blurred since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“For the last decade or so, you had a brothers-in-arms policy at Bild, Spiegel and others,” said Lutz Hachmeister, director of the Institute for Media and Communications Policy in Berlin. “This was a strategy that couldn’t last forever.”
The cease-fire came to a close when a new editor, Georg Mascolo, took over at Der Spiegel in February, after previously sharing the top editorial role. A spokesman for the magazine said the article had been in the works for months, and had not been intended to signal any change in the editorial direction under the new leadership. “Georg Mascolo does not plan any reorientation of the content of Der Spiegel,” the spokesman, Hans-Ulrich Stoldt, wrote via e-mail.
Yet Kai Diekmann, the editor of Bild, said Der Spiegel might have been eager to “put some space between” the publications after they got too close for the comfort of some readers of the magazine, which appeals to Germans with center-left political views.
Both Bild and Der Spiegel published excerpts last year from “Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab,” or “Germany Does Away With Itself,” a book by Thilo Sarrazin, then a board member of the German central bank, over which he was accused of having a racist agenda because of his blunt talk about Muslim immigration.
It appears that there is more than enough room in the German media market for the two publications to coexist. Axel Springer, the publisher that owns Bild, has just reported the most profitable year in its history, with Bild accounting for the large majority of the €296 million in earnings from the company’s domestic newspaper business in 2010. Der Spiegel, whose shareholders include its employees and the publisher Gruner + Jahr, does not report earnings but is also said to be solidly profitable.
Yet the circulation of both publications recently fell just below psychologically significant levels: one million for Der Spiegel and three million for Bild. That means Bild has lost, for now, its title as the largest-circulation newspaper in Europe to The Sun in Britain.
Bild has been adding more political and cultural coverage in an effort to broaden its appeal. Last year it passed Der Spiegel to become the most-visited news Web site in Germany, according to Bitkom, an association of German high-technology companies. Der Spiegel also faces a renewed threat from a competing magazine, Focus, which is being revamped under a new editor.
“The cover story showed that Spiegel wants the position of ‘leitmedium’ in Germany,” said Steffen Burkhardt, a journalism professor at the University of Hamburg, using a term that translates as “leading medium,” and describes the role of what is sometimes called a “newspaper of record” in the English-speaking world. “It took a lot of courage, because Bild has a very good memory.”
Image
A plagiarism scandal that cost Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg his job as defense minister of Germany also laid bare a scramble for influence in the German news media.Credit...Rainer Jensen/European Pressphoto Agency
Bild struck back quickly, displaying the flair for publicity that is a trademark of what Germans call “boulevard” newspapers. (Despite its giant headlines, its enthusiastic coverage of celebrities and its front-page photos of topless women, Bild publishes in a broadsheet, rather than a tabloid, format.)
Only hours after Der Spiegel appeared, with a stylized version of the newspaper’s nameplate outlined with matchsticks, on the cover, Bild appropriated the image for its own promotional use. It distributed matchboxes in Berlin restaurants and bars with a reproduction of the cover on the top and a subscription offer on the bottom.
“I was not unhappy with the story at all,” Mr. Diekmann said during an interview. “It was good advertising for us. We are a strong brand, we are influential, we have big headlines, we are the market leader, so it’s natural that we would get watched by other journalists.”
There is a long tradition of Bild-bashing in Germany: Heinrich Böll’s 1974 novel, “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” revolves around the excesses of a reporter working for a tabloid modeled on Bild.
Der Spiegel acknowledged in its article that it was not exactly news that Bild likes sex and stars. And Bild is not the only paper of its genre to face scrutiny of its reporting methods. In Britain, the tabloid News of the World, owned by News Corp., has faced a series of investigations over allegations that its reporters had engaged in widespread hacking of public figures’ cellphone voice mail.
What has changed, according to Der Spiegel, is that Bild, too, is now trying to play the role of “leitmedium.”
Mr. Diekmann and the Axel Springer chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, “are no longer satisfied being the successful punks of the German media landscape,” Der Spiegel wrote. “They are putting forth the message that Bild is not an outsider, but mainstream. Not the grubby child but a model student. Their paper does not serve the fringes of society, but marks the dignified middle of Germany.”
With his aristocratic name, finely tailored suits and well-tamed hair, Mr. Guttenberg embodies the aspirations of bourgeois Germans — at least, he did until details of his academic shortcuts emerged. Mr. Diekmann, who has edited Bild for a decade, said the paper’s support for Mr. Guttenberg had reflected his popularity, rather than, as Der Spiegel suggested, a cozy arrangement to insert a favored politician into the chancellery.
“Sometimes we are in favor of people, other times we are critical of people,” Mr. Diekmann said. “What was important for us is that we were with our readers. I know that our readers liked our position.”
While both Bild and Der Spiegel may want to be a German leitmedium, at least three other publications could lay claim to that role: the dailies Frankfurter Allgemeine and Süddeutsche Zeitung and the weekly Die Zeit. Indeed, it was the Süddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, that broke the news of Mr. Guttenberg’s copy-and-paste job.
From there, however, the story developed in a way that demonstrated the limits of the influence that even a leitmedium can command in the digital era.
After the Süddeutsche Zeitung article appeared last month, a group of anonymous academics set up a Web site for other researchers to report examples of alleged copying in Mr. Guttenberg’s work. More than 60,000 people signed a petition calling on Chancellor Angela Merkel to dismiss Mr. Guttenberg.
Even Bild was unable to save his job, despite printing headlines like “Good! Guttenberg stays!” and “The people forgive.” The resignation, only a day after Der Spiegel’s article on Bild was published, appeared to undermine the magazine’s complaint that Bild wielded excessive influence in Berlin.
“It showed the limits of Bild’s power,” said Mr. Hachmeister, of the Institute for Media and Communications Policy. “You have to have someone from the elite papers who does the story, but then the Internet has to come in, in order to bring someone down so quickly.”
Advertisement