ARD (public German TV, Channel One) ran a rather long article piece this morning over 'facts' that it'd gathered in the fight against social networking by the evil right-wing and how their 'trolls' manipulate elections.
It is a very thoughtful piece....I will agree. The only problem is that it goes on and on, about the evil right-wing, and never for a moment suggests that the evil left-wing could also have 'trolls', and that they also might be attempting to manipulate elections.
Toward the end of the piece, there's a commentary area. So I went looking at what Germans discussed about the article.
I would suggest that about sixty-percent were critical of the article, and the suggestion that you only need to worry about right-wing behavior or 'trolls' was laughed at.
Where all of this public TV news criticism is going? Well, in the past week....public polls suggest that the AfD (the anti-immigration party) has arrived at 16-percent of the national trend. In fact, if you use state by state polling....there's around five German states which now list the AfD having more support than the SPD (left of center party). I think the TV news crowd have a mandated yet rarely discussed job of trying to control this growth.
The 'Fact' page which now exists on the ARD web site....hypes a lot of propaganda facts. In some ways, the journalists hope to control this whole mass media trend. One problem I see is that most of the 15-year-old to 25-year-old crowd....simply don't view public TV anymore, and are fairly skeptical of the journalists. If you go to the over-sixty crowd....few get into this fact-network or fact-creation. So it's a very small number of the public which access this and get into this discussion.
All of this brings me to this observation. Germans are arriving at conclusions, and now beginning to question facts, fake news, real fake news, propaganda by all sides, and reaching a stage where trust of normal politics doesn't look great.
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