Free Speech in the West

There’s a good essay about the pope flap up at Spiegel Online. It’s by Claus Christian Malzahn, and it should please even the droning bores over at Davids Medienkritik, who have the reputation in the US as sharp critics of anti-Americanism in German journalism. In a big blurry way, of course, it’s true that a lot of German journalists are irritatingly kneejerk and Amerikaskeptisch, but the guys at Medienkritik need fodder every day, and sometimes they just speculate like old ladies leaning out their windows in a little European town, passing on offenses to their prejudices as if they were experts, or even well-informed.

Here’s a classic from last year:

Claus Christian Malzahn must stick out like a sore thumb at SPIEGEL ONLINE. Along with Henryk Broder, he is perhaps the only America-friendly voice on the magazine’s entire staff. You could say he and Broder are the publication’s two token pro-Americans. And make no mistake: They are both highly intelligent, eloquent representatives of a viewpoint rarely heard or voiced in Germany.

This is amusing. Malzahn does stick out like a sore thumb around Spiegel Online’s Berlin office, where I sometimes show my face, because he’s the boss. He’s not a “token pro-American” — he hires the degenerate America loathers that Medienkritik seems to have unearthed on the German staff.

Instead of spinning conspiracy theories of anti-American masterminds in the Spiegel Magazine megacomplex littering the staff with the odd pro-American to foil Davids Medienkritik’s fun, they ought to congratulate Malzahn for hiring people who don’t think in lockstep with him. But that would be, as they say, off-message.

Submitted to the Carnival of German-American Relations

     posted 20 September 2006 by Michael Scott Moore