Yawn (Sorry)

I know I’ve been lazy in bashing Davids Medienkritik—months ago I promised both Ray D and my readers a lot more diligence—but I guess I’ve just had other gnats to fry. Their latest spasm over something at Spiegel Online can’t go untwitted, though. Claus Christian Malzahn has written a “breathtaking” article about anti-Americanism in Germany, according to our friend Ray. Malzahn accomplished this by stating the simple truth: Germans who think Iran is less of a threat than America need to take a deep breath, and think for a minute. But because the truth in this case corresponds with Medienkritik’s mission—bashing Germans for anti-Americanism, especially in the years since Bush II took office, as this graph shows—Ray has erupted in spurts of self-righteous joy.

He starts with what Huckleberry Finn would have called a stretcher:

As we have mentioned before, every great once in a while—either Henryk Broder or Claus Christian Malzahn are allowed to post a token article on SPIEGEL ONLINE that goes against the usual anti-American grain of the magazine.

No, what Ray D claimed before, and as we have documented, was that Broder and Malzahn were “token” contrary journalists in a relentlessly left-wing (or even Socialist) office. Our fact-checkers at Radio Free Mike destroyed that claim — and, I hope, some of Medienkritik’s credibility. Broder is a celebrity columnist and one of the most visible writers at the magazine; Malzahn is boss of the German online office in Berlin. He helps hire the lefties, in other words. Our main point was that political opinion at Spiegel is less monolithic and more subtle than Ray D likes to imagine—makes a blog career of imagining—but this is exactly the point he refuses to admit. He still uses language like “allowed to post,” as if politics within the Spiegel megacomplex were handed down from a high tower in Hamburg.

Here’s another simple point: Anti-Americanism has grown in Europe because of the Iraq war. It’s also higher than anti-Iranianism because a majority of people in Germany are dull-witted, provincial, and hear less, on a daily basis, about a given distant other country than they do about the U.S. When you have as much exposure and might as America, the silly kneejerk criticism follows. I wish things were different, but any serious consideration of anti-Americanism has to remember America’s enormous power in the world. Humans are naturally skeptical of great power: I hope they don’t give that up.

Behind Medienkritik’s assault on Spiegel and other German news outlets I can feel not just justified anger at provincial left-wing attitudes in European newsrooms and readerships but a defensiveness about Bush and neoconservatism in general that I think explains the whole Medienkritik project. Ray D scolds us journalists by saying “introspection and self-criticism are painful,” but a less introspective site than Medienkritik is hard to think of. Ray doesn’t seem to realize that his sloppy, half-accurate shotgun approach to “criticizing” the German media is itself a problem for trans-Atlantic relations because it fans the flames of anti-Europeanism in the States.

Or does he? He lives there, after all (not in Germany), and seems to watch his stat counter. He must realize that bashing European journalism can rile up the web-surfing American right just like bashing America sells magazines to the self-righteous European left.

During the Cold War, thoughtful American critics of Washington used to say they weren’t pro-Communist but anti-anti-Communist, because anti-Communism had become a patriotic dogma that generated so much of its own dangerous nonsense. Today’s anti-Europeanism is no different. Medienkritik is not an antidote to provincialism but just another lame example of it.

     posted 31 March 2007 by Michael Scott Moore