Positive reporting like this will soon land you on the street at SPIEGEL ONLINE Frau Sperber:
Marc Pitzke hasn’t made a career as Amerika-Korrespondent by being Mr. Niceguy or respecting the truth. How about you just stick to guns, fast food, racism, NSA and obesity next time? You just need to take your cute little camera phone to a gun show or a KKK meeting to get the footage we really want for SPIEGEL readers. There are plenty of worthy topics to report on when it comes to the USA without upsetting Mr. Augstein with this excessive exposure to reality.
Gazprom Gerd truly has no shame – partying with “spotless democrat” pal Vladimir Putin as Russia occupies Ukraine (remember Gerd’s principled objection to Iraq?) and systematically stamps out dissent with a tidal wave of paranoid state propaganda. Even SPIEGEL ONLINE can’t support Gerd this time. Maybe Kim Jong Un will be available for Gerd’s 80th?
Nice to see the center-left media in the United States finally start to acknowledge the most brutally apparent examples of flagrant anti-Americanism in European media. We’ve been documenting it for years. Better late than never perhaps.
Being President isn’t easy. Dropping approval ratings at home – and now this from SPIEGEL? The afterglow from the 2008 Berlin speech has clearly faded with the German media elite…Et tu Brutus?
Here’s what’s interesting about this article: The small headline below the article summary reads “The German Prism: Berlin Wants to Spy Too.” If America’s activities constitute spying – than the German government not only “wants to spy” – it has been “spying” for decades now. In many instances, Germany and other European governments have acted more aggressively than the United States.
Even Augstein tacitly acknowledges that his criticism of the United States could equally be a criticism of European governments. This is the pot calling the kettle black while simultaneously criticizing it. Put another way, Augstein’s commentary is both inconsistent and incoherent.
It boils down to this: Every society must grapple with the eternal conflict between privacy and security – and in many cases – European countries come down more heavily on the side of security. America – after all – does not have a national ID card or Anmeldungspflicht.
But Augstein’s work has little to do with some noble crusade to protect the privacy of European citizens. Instead, he is doing what SPIEGEL has always done: Scratching for some pretext to attack the “imperialist other” – the American boogeyman – while attempting to stoke Transatlantic conflict. This was and remains a time-tested formula for moving copy and cashing in with SPIEGEL readers.
Celebrating Obama has outlived its usefullness. Anti-Americanism has a much longer shelf-life…
Spiegel’s crack Amerika-Korrespondent Marc Pitzke strikes again! Apparently – SPIEGEL Online has gotten an extra early scoop on the death of GHW Bush!
Or perhaps its a bit of wishful thinking on the part of Marc Pitzke – who has already prepared a masterpiece of false praise, which is, in fact, a poorly disguised litany of attacks against the elder Bush’s son George W.
Pitzke gets the usual low blows in: The mandatory griping about endless war, torture and how terrible a place America has become since the first Bush governed in a more innocent time. Ah the good old days!
But most importantly – SPIEGEL gets it wrong – again. This isn’t the first – but perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of the magazine’s total bias and lack of professionalism. Pitzke’s next story: Elvis still lives – in New York – in the studio next to mine!
2012 Election Day Update: Guess What Americans – Europe is still disappointed with you and Obama – particularly since you have no socialist equivalent to give you something comparable to our “balanced” political system! Why haven’t you closed Gitmo? Why do you still insist on killing terrorists with drones? Why won’t you bring back Kyoto and end global warming?
Here’s the bottom line: If Obama wins – get ready for 4 more years of subdued moaning in German media about how disappointed we are that America has not yet become the paragon of social justice that we expected Obama to make it. Or – if Romney scores an upset (which we see as unlikely) – a really loud return to full-on, Bush-is-back, Hate-America-Mode. A Romney win is what all German journalists secretely hope for – as it will mark the return of the age of highly profitable and socially acceptable America-bashing that accompanies any Republican administration.
And oh – by the way – SPIEGEL reminds us yet again that America is still in “downfall” mode – a state which the country has apparently been in since the foundation of SPIEGEL magazine: “The American Patient: Of the Downfall of a Great Nation”
We hate to say we told you so – but we did. This was entirely predictable. According to SPIEGEL – Germans are increasingly “disillusioned” with President Obama:
In a new global survey released on Wednesday, approval of President Barack Obama’s policies has declined significantly since he first took office. Overall confidence in Obama and attitudes towards the US have slipped modestly as a consequence. By several measures some of the greatest slippage has occurred in Germany, especially with regard to America’s image and Obama’s foreign policies. After more than three years in office, Germans are disappointed in the US president’s unilateralism; his use of force, particularly drone strikes; his inaction with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian situation and his lack of effort in curbing climate change.
Analysis: The initial euphoria of an Obama victory and Republican defeat will lead some to predict a bold new era of happiness in transatlantic relations. These predictions will gradually be worn to a cool realism/cynicism by geopolitical realities which will inevitably manifest themselves through differences over trade, the use of force in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East, the unwillingness of even the Democrats to go along with Kyoto, etc. Obama may remain quite popular as a personality in the German media. The Republicans – despite their reduced role – will continue to act as foils and receive blame for all that goes wrong. The refrain that what Bush has broken will take time to fix may well grow to become a reflexive defense for some time to come among those who insist on clinging to their own initial euphoria.
But at least Obama is convincing Germans that he is making progress in transforming the American economy into a more socially-just copy of the German economy. According to the SPIEGEL piece:
“Germans also don’t see America as an economic superpower. In 2008, only 30 percent of Germans named China as the world’s leading economic player. Now 62 percent do, while only 13 percent say the U.S. plays that role. No other Europeans judge American economic prowess so harshly.”
But it’s really too bad that Germans still don’t love America now that Bush is gone – we thought that his departure would end all anti-American feeling. All there is left to say is…
It contains no photos of Iraqi voters with ink-dipped fingers. No photos reminding us of Saddam’s mass murder and destruction of his enemies. No reminders of the successful surge that Bush backed despite Reid saying the war was lost. No pictures of American troops and diplomats helping millions of Iraqis building roads, schools, power plants, providing medical care, jobs and stability. No pictures of the Sunni Awakening and the defeat of Al-Qaeda in Anbar province. In short – no pictures telling the whole story or providing any real balance.
Just pictures fitting the SPIEGEL ONLINE anti-American far-left narrative: The American military is evil. The war was all bad. The Iraqis only suffered at the hands of the terrible invaders.
With the Iraq war’s apparent conclusion, one can only say of SPIEGEL ONLINE that – for a publication and readership that styles itself as so utterly nuanced and intelligent – the coverage has – in fact – been utterly one-sided and hyper-simplified propaganda – with very few exceptions. The magazine’s coverage was designed to sell magazines to and please an anti-American audience from beginning to end, and the German readership will never have more than a very narrow and self-satisfying view of the conflict that in no way reflects reality.
Oh – and here’s a shocker – the article and gallery are not featured on SPIEGEL ONLINE’s English site homepage. Wonder why? Perhaps the English-speaking audience demands at least a fig-leaf of intellectual honesty – apparently the German audience does not…
