A visit to Munich and a reminder of the poor state of mainstream U.S. journalism--from Fox News propaganda to MSNBC's Russia obsession

 
(To the right, Munich's famous Rathaus in the heart of the city)

MUNICH, Germany – After my stint in the Army and Vietnam, this city became the scene of my salad days, where I enjoyed the carousel of my mid-20s studying philosophy and journalism at the university, working part-time in a warehouse, and spending far too many hours in the beer halls and beer gardens.

A flood of memories passed through me when I recently returned to my old stomping grounds. One of them was something my journalism professor here said. “If you really want to learn journalism, go to the United States.”

(To the left, my old apartment--the red-tiered rooftop in the center of the photograph--in Munich's Schwabing district) 

It was the mid-1970s. Woodward and Bernstein were chasing Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon out of the White House. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was so busy fending off bribery charges he had to stop attacking the media’s “nattering nabobs of negativism.” I took my professor’s advice. My expatriate days were over.

This go-round I couldn’t help making all sorts of comparison, and the good ol’ USA came up short on many of them. Why does Europe have such a fantastic train system at a time when Donald Trump wants to end subsidies for the last passenger train service in the United States? Why do so many Americans have to worry about health care when Germans like my 89-year-old farmer cousin Georg know they’ll get the care they deserve after a life of hard work?

And then there’s that great U.S. journalism that my professor at the University of Munich cited as the crown jewel of my craft.

I thumbed through the pages of Munich’s major mainstream newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (South German Newspaper). The Wednesday, June 21, edition included 41 news-and-feature-filled pages, the kind of news hole (newsroom lingo for written content) U.S. reporters can only imagine in some drug-induced fantasy. The pages themselves are 30 percent larger than those of major U.S. newspapers. And, yes, there’s an online edition, too.

Even tabloids like Munich’s Abendzeitung (Evening Newspaper) with their screaming headlines and giant photographs have far more stories than most mainstream U.S. newspapers.

The contrast really hit home when I arrived at the Memphis International Airport and read in the local alternative newspaper that the Gannett Corporation, master of the shrunken news hole and owner of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, and many other papers across the country, has put the headquarters for its newly purchased Memphis Commercial Appeal up for sale. Plans are to move elsewhere into smaller space.  Gannett is doing the same at its newspaper in Nashville.

I read further and learned the Memphis Newspaper Guild has filed a complaint against Gannett for its refusal to make severance payments to the 23 Commercial Appeal employees it laid off when it bought the newspaper. Several current workers have joined the protest by hanging “Shame on Gannett” signs around the newspaper office.

Of course, these kinds of developments in Memphis and elsewhere are taking place at a time when U.S. journalism is under severe attack by President Trump, Congress, and other politicians across the land.

Television journalists were recently forbidden to interview U.S. senators outside the Senate chamber. Trump is waging a constant battle with what he considers the purveyors of “fake news”, while those same news outlets struggle to keep up with the stream of misinformation and falsehoods coming out of the White House. Case in point: Trump’s claim of a United Nations “slush fund” to support the Paris climate agreement.  What he referred to is actually the so-called “Green Climate Fund” to aid poorer countries put into place better environmental policies and actions.

A Repubican state senator in Alaska recently slapped a reporter because of a story the reporter wrote. Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte physically attacked reporter Ben Jacobs after Jacobs asked a question he didn’t like during the campaign. Gianforte subsequently received a donation from the director of a conservative broadcasting group, and voters elected him despite the attack.

The nation’s most popular news outlet, Fox News, is largely a mouthpiece for conservative propaganda, while its supposed ideological opposite, MSNBC, spends most of its time on a constant drumbeat about Russia’s alleged interference with the 2016 presidential election.

Speaking of that drumbeat about Russia, FAIR, the flagship publication of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, noted recently how all the reporting on Russia and the 2016 election has come at the expense of other reporting on climate, the economy, healthcare and President Trump’s proposed travel restrictions despite polls that show people want to know more about those issues.

The Russian focus “helps to defuse the ticking time-bomb of accountability for last year’s electoral loss” by Democrats, and it “shifts activist energy and attention away from the issues that could challenge the interests of the elites who run the networks,” FAIR says. In fact, CNN CEO Jeff Zucker told his staff to go back to the Russia story after its recent coverage of climate accords, according to a report by Project Veritas. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spends an estimated 53 percent of her air time on the Russia story, Intercept says.

Thank goodness, good journalism is out there if you look hard for it.  As most reporters on the national scene scurried to find the latest “revelation” about Russian subterfuge, Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica probed the financial holdings of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and found that he’s a slum lord in Baltimore whose “Kushnervilles” are home to 20,000 low-income residents and countless rats, maggots, clogged pipes, and sewage-ruined carpets. Residents who complain have to face Kushner’s lawyers and a court system that mimics the legal maze Charles Dickens described in his 19^th century novel Bleak House.

That’s the kind of reporting my professor in Munich had in mind. Just wish we had more of it.

 A shorter version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press of Jackson, Mississippi.