There's a trend on public TV news (ZDF or ARD, it doesn't matter).....when you watch any of their prime-time newscasts from each evening.....about 60-percent of the 'stuff' will be either political news or Covid news. Remaining bits? Mostly international events....maybe one economics story in the mix, and then sports/weather to wrap it up.
If you did want just plain Germany news, without Covid or politics to that degree.....you might try the commercial networks, or the public regional channels (like HR, SWR, BR, NDR, etc).
This having gotten concreted down? I would say since spring of 2020....it's gotten this bad. The 'Brennpunkt' hype off ARD? It translates to 'focus' and is generally a 15 to 30 minutes emergency production with a minimum of ten 'points' about whatever occurred that day to create a 'panic' in the news room. In 2020, I bet there were eighty of these productions. In 2021? It lessen to some degree.....maybe fifty of them. Almost all were Covid related....a few were to the flood episode in the Ahr Valley region.
Are there topics of a non-Covid or non-political way that interest Germans? I would say these revolve around a dozen things: crime, terrorism, economic woes, corruption, cost of living, urbanization failures, asylum/immigration, mass project failures, medical news, social failures, tourism (either in Germany or across the globe), and movie reviews.
Are Germans noticing this trend? It's hard to say. On one side, I'd suggest that half the nation is fed-up with Covid news and use the mute-button a good bit these days. On the other side....with ban-rule changes coming up almost every other week now....you have to have some source of news to keep you alerted. I tend to use local city announcements now to be aware of what I can or can't do.
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You said: "I tend to use local city announcements now to be aware of what I can or can't do. "
See how quickly your freedoms were taken from you?
The pandemic is over, omicron is the sniffles, but will Germany ever allow your freedoms back?
All of this tied into some up-and-down 'period', and the government can't get beyond that. A good example....all this pressure on bars/pubs....is killing business. Once we get to May....the virus rate drops like a rock and their business soars back to where it should be. Then you come to the end of October....the rate will advance, with new Omicron/delta variants. I generally think the public will grasp this up and down gimmick and trouble is brewing in November 2022 as they attempt the same gimmicks again.
I'll add this...that you can have Germans gather in a non-friend situation and strike up a conversation....with Covid likely to be the top topic. Without journalists around, people express skepticism more often than they did in the fall of 2020. The public forum shows talking about Covid-this or Covid-that...for whatever value they had in the first year....they've burned a number of 'bridges' and aren't actively watched anymore with their 'experts'.
On the people who did buy into the vax-business...on their own level, they now view Covid-vaccinations as flu-like, which infuriates the virus experts. Over the weekend, the Health Minister got all bent-out-of-shape over people saying Omicron is the path to a lesser disease, and chatter of things progressing to flu-like symptoms just got him more upset.
If 2020/2021 were a poker-game, I'd say 2022 is the last 30 minutes of the game where you've gone as far as you desired, and ready to leave the table. I don't see how they can continue the same pace/rule-bans.
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