Cultural Body:

Populist Talkshows Fuel Far Right Rise in Germany

Date: 13 June 2018 - 21:51

News ID: ۵۳۹۶۱

BERLIN (Dispatches) -- The head of Germany’s most powerful cultural body has called for the plug to be pulled on the nation’s multitude of political talkshows for a year, arguing that their populist agenda has helped fuel the rise of the far right.
Olaf Zimmermann, who heads the German cultural council, an umbrella group for organizations from art galleries to television companies, said public broadcasters needed to step back and rethink a format that has helped cement gloom-ridden public attitudes towards refugees and Islam, and propelled them into parliament at last September’s election.
Zimmermann argued that the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF were obsessed with refugee-related issues, often framing them negatively.
The cultural council, which is taxpayer funded, has pointed out that since 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis when almost a million refugees and migrants entered Germany, more than 100 political talk shows have put a topic related to migration at the centre of their discussion.
Since September’s election, which saw the AfD enter the Bundestag for the first time, much debate has surrounded the extent to which framing an issue, or lending a topic a certain perspective, might have helped their cause.
Television analysts have argued that the issue of refugees has been dealt with in a mostly negative way.
Even last week, ARD’s main talkshow Hart Aber Fair - Hard But Fair - led with the question: "To what extent is it possible to integrate young men who have fled from war and archaic societies? How unsafe is Germany as a result of them?”
Zimmermann said in too many cases refugees were unfairly presented as a threat to German society.
A recent talkshow moderated by the veteran host Sandra Maischberger was advertised in TV listings with the title: "Are we too tolerant towards Islam?” Critics were quick to pounce on the word "we” as being problematic because it suggested "them and us”. The program’s title was swiftly changed to: The Islam debate: where does our tolerance end?
Other recent talkshow topics included ones entitled Refugees and criminality, and Beethoven or Burka?
Kai Hafez, a media analyst, said that immigration was rarely presented in talkshows as anything other than negative. "The viewers get used to these negative expressions, and long-term that way the rightwing populists manage to press their points home,” he told Der Spiegel.