Satire Gone Wrong Story

For about two weeks, I've been observing this amusing minor story from German public TV.....involving the WDR network (sub-network from northwest Germany) and this satirical piece that they did one night to conclude their news investigative program.

Somehow, the management folks at the network decided that it'd be a nice joke if they got a local kid's choir group to go sing up this 'Grandma is an environmental sow (pig)' song.

They taped all of this and inserted it into the end of their news program.

So you have to imagine this....off the sub-networks, there's a minor audience, and the numbers really aren't that big.  But this little satire  song got notice, and people who didn't watch it originally....went to the network web site and watched it there the next day or two.

In blunt terms.....a heck of a lot of Germans got upset with the song, and the intention.  A fair amount of criticism has been generated here against the director of the news program....for allowing this to go forward, and there's criticism nationally brewing that maybe the head of public TV needs to take measures to ensure it doesn't happen again.

A lot of this goes to the Greta-syndrome.  It's what I would describe as the 2019 period where all these German 'teenies' got hyped up over climate change, and the Fridays for the Future business started up.  Some journalists see this as a joke....some journalists see the business as a 'weaponized' group, and some Germans are thin-skinned to the degree that satire on topics like this really irk them a good bit. 

Most all of the public TV networks will run investigative journalism programs, and insert comical satire at the very end (it's that common).  Over the years of watching these, I'd generally say that about one-third of the satire pieces probably cross the line, but there are so few viewers....that it probably doesn't matter.  This time, the viewership and social media opened it up to a massive audience.  And it mattered.