Snobbery abounds in establishment media as ever, as national broadcast boss says left-wing people are more likely to become journalists because they are more capable of critical thought.
Kai Gniffke, the head of the German state-owned broadcasting association ARD, has claimed that the reason government-backed journalism is overwhelmingly left-wing is that the job requires critical thinking.
Previous research into the association has shown that over 90 per cent of its volunteers vote exclusively for far-left parties — including the ruling Greens — during Germany’s elections. It is even alleged the broadcaster has a policy of totally blocking members of Germany’s right-wing opposition from appearing on its talk shows at all, not uncommon in Europe where right-populist parties are frozen out of the political process to whatever extent possible by the mainstream in the hope of starving them of oxygen.
In Germany, this process is despite the fact that the AfD are now the third most popular party nationwide, and the single most popular party in the country’s formerly Soviet-controlled eastern region.
However, dismissing criticism of the ARD’s overwhelmingly left-wing bias, Gniffke told one trade union publication during an interview that the outlet basically had no choice but to have that bias, as the job itself only attracts people who are capable of critical thinking.
“The journalism profession is more attractive to critical minds,” he said.
He also emphasised that while there were “conservative voices on ARD”, he also told the interviewer that the media outlet would not give a platform to anyone who, it deems, “rejects the democratic constitutional state and its fundamental values, norms and rules” of German society.
Accusations revolving around the alleged rejection of Germany’s “democratic constitutional state” have repeatedly been used in the country by both media outlets and government officials to silence critics, especially those within the European nation’s populist right wing.
Particular effort has gone into targeting members of the AfD, with the German courts giving security officials permission to spy both on the main party organisation, as well as its youth wing, the latter of which recently being classified as an extremist organisation that threatens democracy.
Things do not stop there, however, with one government official warning earlier this year that any young couple that decides to flee “multicultural life” in German cities by escaping to the countryside should be viewed as “right-wing extremists“.
“People think they are decent people, hard-working young people with children,” Dirk-Martin Christian, who heads up the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Saxony, remarked, before expressing concern that many of these young people were, in fact, seeking “intact national community” away from migrants in “remote areas” of Germany.
He went on to warn that these young people have been able to “gain acceptance” in rural communities by being nice and hardworking, warning that real Germans loyal to the state must work to alienate these individuals or risk allowing “extremists” to have “an easy time of it”.