How much more evidence do we need to know that the legacy media model is broken? Agence France-Presse (AFP) is the oldest and one of the three biggest news agencies in the world. It boasts that its “mission is to provide accurate, balanced and impartial coverage of news”, “free of political, commercial or ideological influence”.
Those are all lies.
Because there’s little “balanced and impartial” about this lede in a major story:
Angry voters where Germany’s far-right AfD party won its first district election over the weekend say they were out to punish the political establishment in Europe’s top economy.
The first thing a journalism student is taught is to never insinuate opinions into hard-news reporting. It’s perfectly fine to put opinions into commentary or features, but hard news must be strictly nothing more than ‘just the facts’.
“Far right” is not a fact. It’s an opinion – but it’s an opinion that’s so ubiquitous in the left-dominated mainstream media that we hardly even notice any more that they’re doing it. Consider, after all, the last time you read, say, the Greens referred to as ‘far-left’ by the media.
What AFP is doing isn’t journalism: it’s gate-keeping for the left-wing EU establishment.
An establishment increasingly threatened by the rise of popular, grass-roots parties.
Speaking to AFP in the ex-communist town of Sonneberg, residents said government officials had long failed to take their mounting concerns over inflation and immigration seriously.
Ingo Schreurs, 58, said he hoped the AfD’s new district administrator Robert Sesselmann would “give voice to the worries and fears and outrage of a lot of citizens”.
Citizens who have the temerity, apparently, to be angry about the destructive policies foisted on them by the EU elite: “Net Zero” and mass immigration of mostly single men, from Africa and the Middle-East.
“[We’re] afraid that we won’t be able to heat our homes this winter” […]
Holger Mueller, 49, said he “no longer saw any Germans” when he drove at night through Sonneberg, nestled on a hillside and famous for more than a century throughout Germany for its toy industry. He hopes the AfD will “stop the flow of foreigners”.
To the horror of the EU elite, German voters suddenly aren’t doing what they’re told.
Far from just a one-off coup in a remote, thinly populated district, the AfD’s triumph came after weeks of surging poll numbers at the national level.
An INSA institute survey Monday by Bild showed the extreme right party with more than 20.5 percent, ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling Social Democrats with 19.5 per cent, its coalition partners the Greens (13.5 percent) and the pro-business FDP (6.5 per cent).
Only the centre-right Christian Democrats had a better showing, at 26.5 percent.
The AfD is polling even better in the former communist East German states of Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony, which will see regional elections next year where the party is hoping to score even bigger breakthroughs.
AFP is at it again, note: “extreme right”. Yet, neither the Greens or Social Democrats are described as even ‘left’, let alone ‘far-left’. And the Christian Democrats, who presided over the disastrous energiewende and the opening of the gates of Europe to a flood of millions of young Muslim men, could only possibly appear “centre-right” to a reporter sitting on the far-left.
Naturally, the establishment are furious. What’s the point of giving the peasants the right to vote, if they’re not going to vote for the candidates the establishment tells them to?
“Democracy means freedom and freedom means responsibility but people have shirked their responsibility here” […]
News magazine Der Spiegel called the party’s win in Sonneberg “the result of a collective failure” of the political class.
Well, the political class has failed, spectacularly. But not in the way Der Spiegel thinks.
They’ve utterly failed their own citizens – and their citizens are punishing them for it.
Consider, after all, what AFP thinks makes AfD “extreme right”:
The AfD was founded in 2013 as an anti-euro outfit before morphing into an anti-Islam, anti-immigration party, harnessing a backlash against then chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance toward refugees.
AFP/RawStory
What are AfD’s actual policies?
We are fully committed to fundamentally renewing our country in the spirit of freedom and democracy and to re-applying these principles. We are open to the world, but we want to be and remain Germans. We want to preserve human dignity, family with children, our Western Christian culture, our language and tradition in a peaceful, democratic and sovereign nation state of the German people.
AfD
That thud you just heard was Kate Hannah, fainting dead away at the sight of such unabashed hate speech and extremism.