Euronews has had a new editorial director for the past 3 weeks and he comes from Axel Springer’s German tabloid Bild.
Quote via Politico (ironically—owned by Springer):
“Strunz declarations on Twitter are worrying because this is not what you’d expect from the boss of Euronews, especially when he applauds [far right German party] AfD results as a sign of functioning democracy,” src
After Trump’s victory, Euronews shared, uncommented, a congratulations video from Orbán to Trump on its Instagram feed.
There is now an open letter from the Union representatives voicing concern about the staff’s journalistic freedoms (in French).
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An Orban-linked group acquired Euronews back in the spring, reportedly by using public funds provided by the Hungarian state. I was surprised that until now, there appeared to be no visible changes in the editorial policy (the outlet has been very critical of Russia, China, Hungary, etc.). But now things appear to change.
idk, i visited them daily and i don’t remember why exactly, but i deleted the app and all bookmarks to their site early this year. it started to feel biased and depressing.
It’s almost like the plutocrats of the world have been using their consolidation and monopolisation of media ownership as a psychological warfare tool to convince the workers to act against their best interests.
Does anyone have any recommendations where to find good independent journalism covering Europe, considering the increasing problems of both Politico and Euronews?
I’ve started listening to @europeanspodcast@mastodon.social, which is fantastic, but it would be nice to complement it with a newspaper of sorts.
euractiv.com is pretty good, but also privatly owned.
arte.tv news format journal is great, but only video and German and French public broadcasting. However they are very willing to have shows not talking about either country. However it is French and German and not English
theguardian.com is independent, but mixed in its reporting standards. Sometimes amazing sometimes just okay.
Arte does have some English, Spanish, Polish, and Italian stuff but it’s quite limited and generally only subtitles. Other languages if they happened to have bought it from somewhere else, say a documentary about Kafka where you can select the original Czech audio. News won’t be among the English subtitled stuff but there’s a good amount of documentaries, background and big-picture stuff. Not just society and politics, all kinds of topics.
Just go browse. And, separately, a metric fuckton of live concerts from all genres.
Brilliant, thanks! I’ve never given Euractiv much of a chance for some reason. Will do it now!
I’ve been using Arte before from France, but I somehow only now realized it’s available for free outside France and Germany as well. Great stuff.
Arte gets a bit of funding from the EU as well, to ad subtitles for some programming to Spanish, Italian, English and Polish. However outside the EU you sometimes need VPN to access to content.
Depends on what you mean by independent.
dw.com Deutsche Welle is EN German state sponsored
DW and BBC are both publicly owned news organizations with good reputations for high quality reporting and journalistic integrity.
DW is actually the closest thing to state television in Germany. Despite being a member of the ARD, they are financed directly via the federal budget rather than via the normal broadcast fee. (However, quality across all of ARD is similar nonetheless.)
They’re in fact forbidden from broadcasting within Germany, doubly so: First off they’re not public but state TV. secondly, they’re federal while broadcasting is state prerogative.
Expect their editorial policy to align with Germany’s foreign policy, and there’s some selection and framing going on occasionally in the sense of “we’ll report about a problem but only in the context of it being addressed” kind of deal. They’ll report about arguments within Germany, but they won’t start any. When it comes to raw factuality they’re highly reliable.
I think the ARD membership is just about access to each other’s programming, there’s zero overlap when it comes to editorial staff, running the channel etc. That would be highly unconstitutional.
DW isn’t actually banned from broadcasting in Germany but I don’t believe they broadcast at all anymore, since the target audience is international. But regardless, yeah they are a high quality channel with factual reporting.
Well there’s no explicit ban there’s simply no Rechtsgrundlage. Also, a decision of the constitutional court which I can’t be bothered to unearth now regarding the establishment of the ZDF, which was initially supposed to be a federal broadcaster because the ARD was too left (according to the CDU).
All those stations, radio or TV, broadcasting in the whole republic (ARD, ZDF, DLF) are based on inter-state treaties because only the states can set such a thing up. It gets even more complicated because originally DW was a short-wave station set up by the ARD, then it became fully federal, now it’s still federal but also part of the ARD, but as said doesn’t broadcast domestically. Internet doesn’t count, there, just actual airwaves.
The target audience is all abroad, both the diaspora (hence German language programming) as well as general foreign propaganda. As in “broadcast the German view of things”. Similar to BBC World, France24, Voice of America and… RT. Just that RT sucks donkey ass, even more than VoA, because the Russian regime does suck even more than the CIA. Can’t divorce those broadcasters from the states running them.
True - I guess I just need to be able to safely trust their journalistic integrity, it doesn’t need to be completely independent in a strict sense.
I should absolutely start reading DW, thanks for the reminder! Though their coverage of the Amsterdam unrest does not seem immediately encouraging. I guess it is German after all. At least the Guardian did a decent job on that.
Yeah, take everything German news agencies have to say about topics involving Israel with grains of salt. A shitton of independent left-wing German news agencies are pro-Israel. Those that aren’t are usually full on tankie, pro-Russia and everything for some fucking reason.
Their reports on Gaza are quite unambiguous in who’s suffering and who’s at fault, but that’s by presenting facts, not interpreting them, or doing much drilling. Generally speaking they avoid talking about Israeli politics as much as they can: If the foreign ministry doesn’t want to talk about it you won’t see it on DW, there’s no direct ties just some kind of telepathic connection.
Compare that with their reports on e.g. the reparations discussion with Namibia, it’s night and day when it comes to covering detail.
So, reading between the lines, he didn’t leave Bild on good terms and Springer is trying to torpedo his new job.
That is possible too. But the union representatives complaining are probably not bought by Springer.
Euronews is still owned by a Portuguese fascist with ties to Orban. Their reporters have done a good job at keeping it fair, but that makes the editorial director much more dangerous for the current standards.
