Lying press

Lying press (German: Lügenpresse, lit. 'lies press') is a pejorative political term used largely by German political movements for the printed press and the mass media at large, when it is believed not to have the quest for truth at the heart of its coverage.

History

The compound word Lügenpresse has been used intermittently since the 19th century in political polemics in Germany, by a wide range of groups and movements in a variety of debates and conflicts.^[1] Isolated uses can be traced back as far as the Vormärz period.^[2] The term gained traction in the March 1848 Revolution when Catholic circles employed it to attack the rising, hostile liberal press. In the Franco-German War (1870–71) and particularly World War I (1914–18) German intellectuals and journalists used the term to denounce what they believed was enemy war propaganda. The Evangelischer Pressedienst, to cite but one example, made its mission the fight against the "lying press" which it considered to be the "strongest weapon of the enemy".^[3] After the war, German-speaking Jewish Marxists such as Karl Radek and Alexander Parvus vilified "the bourgeois lying press" as part of their class struggle rhetoric.^[4][5] The National Socialists adopted the term for their propaganda against the Jewish, communist and later the foreign press. During the protests of 1968, left-wing students disparaged the liberal-conservative Axel Springer publishing house, notably its flagship daily Bild, as a "lying press".^[6]

Current use

Germany

"Lügenpresse" banner on a Pegida demonstration

In late 2014, the term was repopularised by the right-wing grassroots movement Pegida in response to what its protesters felt was a scornful treatment by the mainstream media, as well as biased press reporting on the rising migrant influx and other immigration issues. It was chosen to be the Un-word of the year 2014 by a panel of five linguists and journalists of the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache for "wholesale defamation" of the work of the media.^[7] President Gauck condemned the chanting of the slogan as "ahistorical nonsense", maintaining that in contrast to the Nazi and the GDR era the federal German press is not manipulative in character and "covers events mostly in a correct and balanced way".^[8]

AfD chairwoman Frauke Petry accused the German media of "defamatory" coverage of her party at a party congress at Hanover, but said the party executive would use the term "lying press" sparingly, preferring the milder designation "Pinocchio press".^[9] Her fellow party member Björn Höcke criticized 'Lügenpresse' as too sweeping a verdict for the journalistic profession, arguing instead for the alternative, phonetically very similar term 'Lückenpresse' ("gaps press"), which would describe more accurately the tendency of the press for selective reporting.^[10]

German media detractors felt vindicated by the conspicuous lack of mainstream coverage on the sexual assaults on 2016 New Year's Eve.^[11] Most media outlets ignored the mass assaults by North African migrants and only started reporting on them five days later, after a wave of anger on social media made covering them unavoidable.^[12][13] The delay in reporting on the incidents lead to accusations that the authorities and the media attempted to ignore or cover up the migrant attacks to avoid criticism against the asylum and migration policy of the Merkel government.^[14][15] Former interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU) criticized the media for upholding a "cartel of silence": "There's suspicion that they believe they don't have to report on such assaults, especially involving migrants and foreigners, for fear of unsettling the public."^[11] The German press codex forbids mentioning the religion or ethnicity of criminal suspects and offenders unless there is a "factual connection" to the crime.^[16]

Polls

A 2015 poll by Infratest dimap found one-fifth of Germans using the term in reference to German media, including newspapers, radio and TV, while almost three-fourth do not employ the word. 42 percent have doubts about the media's credibility, whereas 52 percent believe its coverage to be reliable on the whole.^[17] According to a representative poll by the Allensbach Institute of the same year, 39 percent of adult Germans think that there is some truth to the criticism of Pegida that the mainstream press is distorting facts and concealing crucial information from the reader; in the new states of Germany this is even believed by 44 percent of the population.^[18] Another 2015 survey, by the weekly Die Zeit, found that 50 percent of respondents did not trust the media coverage on the refugee crisis, 56 percent not on the Pegida movement, 63 percent not on the European debt crisis and 66 percent not on the Ukraine conflict.^[19]

United States

The term has come into use during the 2016 US presidential election cycle, first largely online, in reference to what was felt by some as unfair coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump by the media.^[20] At October 2016 political rallies in the US, Trump supporters have been seen shouting the word at reporters in the "press pen".^[21] Trump himself often referred to the assembled press at his rallies as "the most dishonest people" and "unbelievable liars".^[22]

After winning the election, Trump gathered the media executives and anchors at a closed meeting scolding them reportedly as "liars, the deceitful, dishonest media who got it all wrong",^[23][22] referring to what he believed were falsehoods spread by the corporate media and mainstream pundits during the campaign and the fact that most of them had predicted a Clinton win throughout it. On his first rally as president-elect, Trump reiterated publicly his criticism of the "extremely dishonest press".^[24]

Some critics from within the media, like the Sydney-based journalist Frank Chung, point out that the American media widely applied double standards in their coverage of the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton, refusing for example to report on concrete evidence that Democrat operatives orchestrated violence against Trump supporters on his rallies, while obsessing over fake news of hate crimes committed allegedly by "Trump's America". He further notes that the mainstream media has shown a propensity to suppress criticism of their perceived bias through tieing it with Nazism.^[25]

Polls

According to Gallup, "since 2007, the majority of Americans have had little or no trust in the mass media." Since 2012, the trust level of the American public into the ability of the mainstream media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly" remained at around 40 percent.^[26] This value further decreased in the course of the 2016 presidential election cycle to 32 percent, the "lowest level in Gallup polling history". With Republicans it even dropped to only 16 percent.^[27]

See also

• Journaille

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lying press.