I sat and watched ZDF (Channel Two of German public TV) last night, and their Frontal-21 program (news documentary piece). So there were two curious pieces:
1. Guest-worker program crapping out during the asparagus season.
For those who didn't know....April/May is this critical season in Germany where asparagus is grown and harvested. If you bring this up with Germans....they get all intense and will tell you about the seven different ways they serve asparagus, and will admit that they serve it around ten times in this brief season.
So on the other side of this story....asparagus is manpower intensive, and Germans just aren't that interested in farm-work of this type. It's also a crop that you can invent a mechanical process or machine.....to do the work. So guest-workers come in....typically from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.
A general contract is that you (the farmer) get around a dozen (sometimes even up to a hundred) to handle the work required, and you provide 'quarters' with a set pay-scale.
Well....Covid has reshaped the whole industry, and Covid in their farm operations is still running rampant. The bigger operations now have legal issues brewing on the treatment of the workers, and they even have security people hired to chase off news journalists (as seen from the episode last night).
What you see brewing is a massive PR situation, and likely political action coming to make harvesting asparagus nearly impossible. The 2022 season? I would expect enough problems that the price for asparagus will probably double as you get into next year.
2. Near the end of the Frontal program.....they went to protests/demonstrations and got into the topic of journalists....well.....in their mind, fake journalists.
You see, in the old days (probably before 1990s), you had tons of journalists around Germany....working for radio, public TV, magazines and newspapers. They were all considered legit journalists.
In the past decade, because of the mistrust of the remaining journalists (a lot of have disappeared in terms of publications or radio coverage)....new media or internet journalists have appeared, with camera equipment and a savvy nature on coverage.
The public TV journalists don't consider these journalists (bloggers for the most part) of the same quality. They were careful not to say 'fake', but just about every part of the 8-minute piece....was built around that suggestion.
Journalists now covering journalists, as part of the news? Well, by the end of the segment, that was my main take on the situation.
The chief problem here....it used to be that journalists walked into a situation....got the basic story....a couple of facts....then built a simple 2-minute story (at least in Germany, that's how it used to work). That type of journalism went away, and now you have a large segment who are building stories to sell a side or a statement to the angle. The blogger crew? They are picking up the pieces and telling the other side of the story. Yeah....more or less....competition now.
As for the public viewing the opposition news? Well...it's reached a point where they don't truly believe everything they see on ARD/ZDF (the two public TV networks). Without thinking much over this....they've invited blogger journalism to exist.
So this effort to downsize or accuse the new journalists being 'fake'? Unless something radical occurs with the big guys....I don't see this new journalism trend halting or downsizing. It's like discussing the 'Fridays for the Future' kids....eventually, some group is going appear and take up an opposition point....probably called 'Mondays for Reality'.
Bottom line for the whole Frontal show? Well....if there had been something decent on TV (reality TV jungle series, murder-mystery movie, or grill-show), I probably would have preferred to watch that....but it's been a lousy choice of shows for the past month or two.
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