On the very first news of distress at a nuclear power plant in Japan, that is, at a time when virtually nothing was known about the essential aspects of the incident, people all over Germany took to the streets to demand the end of nuclear power. The same dogmatic spirit is at work in the below case.
To be sure, the broadcast in question below is just one, minute particle of an example of the organised, systematic disinformation of the German population by the political class and its subservient media.
It causes me physical pain to listen to the "news" in my country, which consist mainly of highly distorted and biased "reports," whose aggregate message and effect is to cement the German definition of liberty:
Freedom is a dangerous lack of state control.
Mind you, the population is sufficiently conditioned to identify with and therefore demand the kind of deception offered by the media. In this vital respect, nothing has changed since the German (nation) state was founded in 1871; the population believes with fanatical fervour in the state, no less than they did under hyper-dad Bismarck, the Kaiser, Hindenburg, the Führer and the various Bundeskanzler of the past decades.
Thanks to a total state monopoly on education, generations of Germans have been successfully drilled to believe in the state as the ultimate purveyor of absolute truth.
Hence, most Germans will tell you that (basically) state-run broadcasting (which is financed by extracting under threat of force fees from anyone who owns a radio, TV, or computer, irrespective of their actually tuning in to state broadcasts) is absolutely essential to counteract the irresponsible media choices that their compatriots are likely to make in the absence of state controlled info intake.
For some background: ARD and ZDF, both state run, are the two dominant TV broadcasters in Germany. GAU, is an acronym originating from the long-standing controversy on the wisdom or unwisdom of building nuclear plants. The term is composed from Größter Anzunehmender Unfall - the English equivalent would be something like: Largest Accident Conceivable (LAC).
Also note, radical, even violent opposition to the building of nuclear power plants is one of the formative cornerstones of German environmentalism. Meanwhile, the pretence of ecological concern has become a prime dogma of political correctness (assumed, under the initial leadership of the Green party, by all other parties today), and a major emotional weapon in political debates. Never let a crisis go to waste, describes the hidden agenda of those who instrumentalise the Fukushima incident to use this emotional weapon to further their political ends.
On a more fundamental level, apart from allowing people to engage in the popular sport of acting out pent-up feelings of hatred and malice, what is going on is this:
In a totalitarian democracy, there is an inevitable tendency toward sophocracy (the rule by those supposedly knowing better than others), because voters are likely to support him, who seems to argue most compellingly. So, there is a fundamental need to be dramatically right, to know better than any political opponent. The reward is unrestrained power. Of course, the ultimate in being dramatically right is attained if a political movement manages to convince voters that they will die or the world will perish unless they follow the precepts of that movement - that is what is behind environmental sensationalism, or indeed America's jingoistic imperialism.
Americans do not know how lucky they are to have such an incredible breadth and depth of truthful sources of information at their disposal. In Germany, the non-state internet is beginning to challenge the informational Gleichschaltung that keeps an entire nation in the dark. The excellent NoTricksZone, being a case in point:
ARD public television is Germany’s flagship news channel which broadcasts its “Tagesschau” news at the prime-time slot of 8 p.m. You can compare it to the BBC News (unfortunately its reputation is following the same path).
It’s no secret that the German media has über-hyped the news in Japan in order to über-dramatize the nuclear power plant accident. So dramatic was the response to the incident in Japan that Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the immediate shutdown of 7 of Germany’s older reactors in order to restore some semblance of calm among Germany’s freaked out population.
As an example of the media’s reckless reporting, Zettels Raum blog here brings our attention to 14 factual errors made in the ARD news last Thursday evening. Zettels Raum writes:
You will probably not want to believe what you are about to read, but it is the truth: In its Prime-time newscast yesterday at 8 pm, the “Tageschau” reported 2:30 min on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. In these two and half minutes, there were 14 factual errors.”
The Zettels Raum author then lists all 14 errors and corrects them. As a whole, the entire ARD report was what Germans would call a media GAU (huge media meltdown). Of course all the errors, every one of them, served to exaggerate and over-dramatize the situation. I’ll now describe briefly each error.
The source.
Also, take a look at this wall of shame listing journalistic misrepresentations of the events in Japan.
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