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Last month, Bernhard Poerksen wrote an article assessing coverage of Donald Trump, whom he repeatedly described as a “media monster.” Among other arguments, Poerksen turned a skeptical eye on an image that a photojournalist took of Trump following the attempt to assassinate him at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, showing his fist raised and blood flecked across his check. The photo resulted from “an intuitive cooperation between Donald Trump and the photojournalist,” Poerksen wrote, and reflected “a disturbing symbiosis of a kind that has never been seen before in media history”—between “a fascist entertainer and a fanatically fast-paced journalism that is fighting for autonomy and which, at the very least, suspects that it may have long since lost the battle for authoritativeness.”
Criticism of Trump coverage is ubiquitous these days, but Poerksen’s article had a singular backstory. For starters, Poerksen lives in Germany; he works as a professor of media studies at the University of Tübingen, in the country’s southwest. And he had specifically been assigned to critique the prestigious German newsmagazine Der Spiegel—in the magazine’s own pages. Dirk Kurbjuweit, Der Spiegel’s editor in chief, asked Poerksen—who, he said, is “likely the best-known observer and critic of the media in Germany”—to write regular essays assessing how the publication tackles major stories, in the name of being transparent with its readers. “We want them to know what an expert thinks about our work,” Kurbjuweit wrote. He added that Poerksen would be given unfettered access to Der Spiegel’s archives and staff, and that the magazine would publish his judgments unedited—“even if it hurts.”
Poerksen’s appointment seemed to echo the role that the “public editor” once played at various major US news organizations: that of an ombudsman, who would weigh in from an internal yet independent perch on day-to-day reader complaints, questionable stories, and ethical debates. (NPR still has such an arrangement, but other US outlets eighty-sixed theirs long ago, to the chagrin of many media watchers.) Der Spiegel has famously rigorous fact-checking procedures, but it has not been immune to the sort of controversies that a public editor might adjudicate: in 2019, Claas Relotius, a star reporter at the magazine, was unmasked as a serial fabulist, as Anna Altman reported for CJR at the time.
Poerksen’s new role at Der Spiegel does involve engagement with journalists and their readers—and yet it is unique in many ways. Unlike US public editors of yore, he will write only occasional essays, in part due to time pressures. (He is not employed by Der Spiegel, nor paid by it for his work.) The magazine initially asked him to review its coverage of the COVID pandemic, he told me recently, but he had a hard time finding any factual mistakes and so decided to adopt a broader focus, scrutinizing what he calls the “grammar” and “rhetorical routines” of journalism. He was inspired in this, he says, by the work of the US media critic and academic Jay Rosen, among others. At one point in our conversation, he described his role to me as that of a “public media critic.”
Rosen, who knows Poerksen, told me in an email that Der Spiegel is undertaking a “worthy experiment.” The magazine “wants Poerksen to bring academic knowledge to the job of evaluating Der Spiegel, and in that sense his perspective will be that of an outsider” to the media business, Rosen says. “The ombudsman or public editor position has not been imagined that way.” (Poerksen, for his part, asked me if I could persuade the New York Times or Washington Post to appoint Rosen to a similar role. I assured him that I could not.)
And Poerksen’s concerns are global, and existential. He told me that he is interested in examining whether and how objectivity and other journalistic traditions work at a moment of “polycrisis”: the climate emergency; the rise of populism; the possibility of the US becoming a dictatorship. Modern journalism needs a space to consider “fundamental questions,” Poerksen says. Among them: What is the value of the journalist as a “neutral observer in this epistemological Switzerland, just taking notes when the world is breaking apart”?
Poerksen chose to focus his first column on Trump to illustrate the type of media criticism that he is trying to do. “Trump is a huge anomaly for the media—I would say he’s the hyperstimulus for the global outrage society,” Poerksen said. “We are part of this endless news cycle where every utterance—every lie, every racist and sexist attack—is reported worldwide in no time.” Other populist politicians, he added, “are not as talented in finding these trigger points” for the media. Trump “really knows how to get into the system and how to rule it.”
None of this is to say, of course, that Poerksen and Der Spiegel aren’t also focused on far-right populists closer to home: in recent years, the Alternative für Deutschland party has gained in popularity, culminating in a recent victory in elections in the state of Thuringia—the first of its kind that any far-right party has recorded in Germany since the end of World War II. This surge has had concrete consequences for journalism; a European press freedom group reported recently that hatred of the press is a “unifying ideological element” for German far-right actors and has morphed into threats and physical violence. At the national level, journalists have been at the forefront of exposing far-right designs: Correctiv, a nonprofit outlet inspired in part by ProPublica, revealed the AfD’s ties to secret plans to deport people en masse (including by taking photos from a sauna raft)—inspiring millions of people to take to the streets in protest. “In Germany, we’re really sensitive to losing our democracy,” Daniel Drepper, the cofounder of Correctiv, told the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism earlier this year. “There’s no journalism in a dictatorship.”
The questions facing German journalists in light of this far-right swell are much the same as those that apply to Trump, Poerksen says: “How much publicity, how much oxygen do you give somebody who is attacking the system?” And yet, when it comes to regulating this type of speech, the German media system is equipped differently from that of the US, thanks in no small part to the legacy of Nazism. Earlier this year, the interior minister moved to ban Compact, a far-right magazine, and associated entities (including an online store that, among other things, sold Trump-branded coins), alleging that the publication posed a threat to Jews, migrants, and the parliamentary democracy established by Germany’s postwar constitution. A court has since suspended the ban, suggesting that while aspects of Compact’s coverage violated the constitution, outlawing it wasn’t necessarily justified. For Poerksen, the ban was, at a minimum, rushed and poorly executed. Poerksen “detests” Compact’s conspiratorial bent, he says. “But that doesn’t mean you have to ban them.”
The legacy of Nazism also continues to inform mainstream media coverage of the far right in Germany, Poerksen says, in that “they really take the historic horrors of fascism seriously.” Assessing Der Spiegel’s coverage of Trump, Poerksen found it to be clearer-eyed than that produced by many US publications, at least in the sense that, “nearly from the very beginning,” they discussed him as “a danger for democracy.” (In the US, Poerksen said, major outlets have tended to “ignore that he is a fascist, as well as an entertainer.”) Nor has Der Spiegel really gone in for “false balance” or what Poerksen calls “this form of horrible psychological character analysis” of Trump: “Is he a narcissist? Can we ask some psychologists to give us a diagnosis from afar?”
Poerksen wrote in his essay that he found the work of Der Spiegel’s US correspondents to be “refreshingly undogmatic.” Still, he did identify what he saw as flaws in the magazine’s coverage: a reliance on photos that make Trump look virile and triumphant; a susceptibility to Steve Bannon’s old strategy of flooding the zone with shit. Not that this was all Der Spiegel’s fault. All of the coverage that Poerksen reviewed demonstrated “an attempt to tame the media monster through hard-hitting journalism”—and yet the attempts failed because “there is no avoiding it,” he wrote. “The media monster always wins because attention has become a value in and of itself. Even the attempt to dismantle and deconstruct—mea culpa—has become part of the game.”
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.