Forum Chatter

"Who needs journalists? In Germany, politicians are interviewing themselves in an attempt to reach voters directly. Press advocates say the trend poses a risk to traditional journalism — and even democracy itself."

-- Deutsche Welle (23 Oct 2019) Rosalia Romaniec, Kay-Alexander Scholz

It's an interesting opening for an article up on DW today.  Over the past six years, I've followed the German public forum chatter (via ARD and ZDF), and found that it presented on some rare occasions.....real dialog, and facts needed to understand a problem or development. 

On other occasions, the forum was built in some way to 'sell' you a position, and limit your perception of the landscape.

But I also came to realize that a limited audience existed with the public TV forum business, and a large segment of German society simply bypassed the forum chatter, and this was mostly a 'short-sell'. 

Lack of trust in the public TV business or the hyped-up participants?  I would suggest that Germans have become like Americans, questioning facts, implying biased facts or coverage, and quietly hinting of fake-news (don't ever use the word around intellectuals or German journalists.....they freak out).

There's a Brit program that I generally like....where the BBC brings on five 'experts' (sometimes political folks, and sometimes journalists).  The show?  Question Time.  The great part about this show is that they open up the talk to audience members, and suddenly you get a 60-second dialog which jabs straight into the heart of a subject, and changes the whole landscape of the understanding. These jabs?  Well....they come from the audience. 

So you look over at the German versions of public forums, and it's rare that you have interaction occur.  They'd usually flip over to some assistant moderator who reads off Instagram or Twitter commentary during the show.....avoiding public direct contact to the German 'experts'.  So you never have a clear understanding of how the public feels (if they were resentful, embittered, or disheartened). 

Do the public forums help?  I might argue in their favor, but there are so few people watching these....that you simply are helping a small group of people to sell a message across a minor part of Germany (82-million).