What the Media Don't Say

Fifteen wars are raging in the world today, many of them have been under way for years. Many of them have fallen into oblivion - they seldom turn up in the German media and reports on the fighting, the victims or the conflicts’ backgrounds are a rarerity.

Now, a new German organization "Initiative Nachrichtenaufklärung" (news clarification initiative) has started to put the forgotten wars back on the list of the country's Top 10 neglected stories.

“We [in the media] are always fixed on a big conflict -- at the moment the Iraq conflict -- and forget that in Africa horrible wars have been taking place for years,” says Hans Leyendecker of the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung who is a jury member of the initative. “We don’t report about how we have forgotten an entire continent. And the fact that we now put this in the forefront shows that we want to draw attention to the stories that are repressed, to make people aware of them again.”

The Top 10 ignored

Each year, Leyendecker and the other illustrious jury members from the world of German journalism choose 10 topics from a long list of neglected issues compiled by students from the universities in Dortmund and Siegen.

This year, the Iraq conflict has made it to the list, too, however, from an angle that the media would otherwise disregard, according to Initiative Nachrichtenaufklärung. The story “Junkyard Iraq” is about how the U.S. military could use a war on Iraq to rid itself of old munitions and bombs that are five times cheaper to expend in combat than to dispose of properly. Initiative Nachrichtenaufklärung says that U.S. Army spokespersons in Germany pointed this out just before the 1990-91 Gulf War.

Filling cracks

Initiative Nachrichtenaufklärung was launched five years ago in Germany, taking as its model the organization “Project Censored,” which had been drawing attention to the U.S. media’s selectivity since 1977.

Many news issues just fall through the cracks explains jury member and journalism professor Horst Pöttker, from the University of Dortmund: “They are also neglected because nothing new happens, because these are things that have been going on for years or even for decades. This is the selfsame normality that at some point doesn’t find its way into the newspapers or the TV programs anymore.”

In contrast to Project Censored, Initiative Nachrichtenaufklärung focuses on issues relevant to Germans and Germany. For example, number two in this year's Top 10 is about how German retirement homes give their residents psychopharmaceuticals so they’ll be easier to care for. The Hanover Expo disaster made it to number five. Numerous small- and medium-sized companies which invested heavily in the 2000 world exposition went bankrupt after organizers refused to pay for services they provided. The organizers say their actions are justified as visitor numbers were far lower than expected.

Too much work to bother

Leyendecker says the topics are disregarded by the media because they require too much research. “There’s not enough time or money. And sometimes it’s because of laziness that issues that are cumbersome aren’t dealt with,” he said.

The current economic crisis in the German media doesn’t help. Many media enterprises are too strapped for cash to put their resources into research-intensive topics if they don’t appear promising from the start. Instead journalists focus more and more on the hunt for scoops.

Ready to censor

In the U.S., Jason Spencer from “Project Censored” has recognized another problem: Surveys show that 70 percent of American journalists are willing to engage in self censorship.

“Anyone involved in journalism knows the whole point of being a journalist is to have your story published and to have your story read. And if you know there is a system of an editor and a board of directors in your company and a board of executives who aren’t going to like your story and who aren’t going to print your story, you are not going to waste your time writing that story,” Spencer maintains.

Leyendecker hopes that the German media will finally go for the 10 neglected stories it has highlighted, “that one or another topic attracts attention and that one doesn’t do what one often does in editorial offices -- that one says, ‘No, that’s too complicated, too difficult or that’s not at all exciting on first sight.’ That one goes and takes on a topic and tries, and maybe something will come of it. We can only make suggestions.”