Making Hostility a Media Event

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In West Germany, Uncle Sam is a journalistic whipping boy

Jets swooped in formation, spun in circles, flew upside down: the show at the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein, West Germany, this month was flashy enough to draw some 300,000 enthusiastic spectators. Yet as the display appeared on West German television and in newspapers and magazines, the main event seemed not to have been the five-hour show, but rather the largely nonviolent arrest of about 250 left-wing demonstrators by U.S. military police. For the protesters, who sought to publicize their opposition to scheduled European deployment of U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles, the day was a triumph. The Frankfurter Rundschau (circ. 200,000) contended, "American soldiers on German soil were randomly beating, arresting and handcuffing demonstrators like criminals." The influential newsweekly Der Spiegel (circ. 970,000) said, "Soldiers, armed with bats and grim expressions, took the demonstrators, who did not put up any resistance, and threw them like cargo into army trucks."

Those stories were not a temporary outpouring of journalists' emotion, prompted perhaps by some roughhouse treatment of protesters by heavy-booted American soldiers. The coverage was typical of West Germany's ideologically charged press. Not surprisingly, given the close economic and political ties between Washington and Bonn, there is a preponderance of conservative and pro-NATO publications at the top in circulation. But a prestigious and disproportionately influential faction of West German journalism is assertively anti-American.

The hard-core antimissile movement certainly represents a minority in the Federal Republic, and polls show that the German public is as uneasy about Soviet militarism as it is about missile deployment. But to a number of trend-setting and leftist-oriented journals, including the Frankfurter Rundschau, Spiegel and the picture weekly Stern (circ. 1.6 million), the missile antis are the only side worthy of full coverage. Beyond that, Stern and other periodicals repeatedly accuse the Reagan Administration of insincerity in its arms-reduction talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva, and of a readiness to use Europe as a battlefield in a limited nuclear war. Said the Frankfurter Rundschau: "There have been hints from the U.S. that war could be limited, even if an inhabited Europe would no longer exist." Defense of American policy by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gets short shrift. Attacks on the Reagan Administration's commitment to peace by top Social Democrats are reported in full, except for a failure to note that former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was a principal architect of the missile-deployment plan. Led by Spiegel, the leftist periodicals have depicted the U.S. as a nation of knee-jerk militarists, and simultaneously have managed to find the Soviets flexible and reasonable. Said

Spiegel of Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov: "He has clearly engaged himself for peace."

Mistrust of the U.S. extends to the fundamental question of whether the country should look east or west in its diplomacy. Says Pollster Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, director of the Allensbach research institute: "Some of the most influential media in Germany treat the question of the Western defense alliance in the main negatively." The Soviet-supported Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the Marxist insurgents in El Salvador enjoy favorable attention in much of the West German press; the U.S. is depicted as a regional imperialist. When Henry Kissinger was appointed by President Reagan to head a commission on Central American policy, Spiegel wrote that he "spoke with typical gringo arrogance." The negative emphasis extends even to minor matters: both Spiegel and Stern make frequent sneering references to the Hollywood background of President Reagan and his wife Nancy, and to the cowboy and gangster facets of the American heritage.

Despite such examples, many West German journalists ardently deny that there is any tinge of anti-Americanism in their nation's reporting. Argues Television Commentator Werner Hofer: "What there is, instead, is justified criticism of policies of the Reagan Administration."

Pro-NATO journalists like Countess Marion Donhoff, co-publisher of the upper-brow liberal weekly Die Zeit (circ. 404,000), contend that anti-American sentiment would dissipate with the restoration of even a more moderate Republican Administration. Other editors offer a range of reasons for an anti-American tenor, from resentment and envy of U.S. political power in the world to repercussions from the 1970s. Says Edi- tor Werner Holzer of the Frankfurter Rundschau: "The young and the left had great love for the U.S., but then came Viet Nam and Watergate to change the picture, and we try to write about the reasons for that." One possible factor in rousing anti-Americanism was former Chancellor Schmidt's open disdain for President Jimmy Carter, whom he regarded as ineffectual, and then for Reagan, whom he considered rigid and combative in dealing with the Soviets. Says Editor Theo Sommer of Die Zeit: "The new Chancellor has made a deliberate attempt to mitigate some of the tensions with Washington, and reporters cannot help but reflect that change in tone." Whatever explanations the journalists offer, however, anti-Americanism is often blatant, and it is only reflective of a larger problem of journalistic honesty. West German academics and intellectuals--a category in which most German journalists place themselves--tend to believe that progress is on the side of the left. Thus they are often reluctant to apply the same rigorous moral standards to the Soviet Union and its allies that they do to the U.S.

Certainly, by comparison to reportage in France and Italy, West Germany's coverage is more factual, if not always sufficiently careful or thorough; it is also less polemic, and less acutely polarized between journals of highbrow analysis and sensational gutter tabloids. There is a stronger tradition of investigative reporting in West Germany than in neighboring countries, though far less than in the U.S. West German reporters were encouraged to develop American-style standards of accuracy and objectivity by U.S. occupation forces in the 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, many of today's senior journalists were educated partly in the U.S.

Nonetheless, the West German press, unlike its American counterpart, is divided not only by ideology but also by political party. Papers are just as partisan in news stories as in editorials. In contrast to American newspapers, which may accompany a straight news story with an interpretive sidebar, West German journals often gloss over the news and publish the analysis. The conservative Kohl has powerful allies: the nationally distributed Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (circ. 332,000), probably the country's most influential daily and all but certainly its weightiest; Die Welt (circ. 210,000), the intellectual flagship of Press Lord Axel Springer's chain, and perhaps the most ardently pro-American, pro-Israeli and anti-Soviet publication in West Germany; Springer's giant Bild Zeitung (circ. 5 million), a sensationalized daily featuring bare-breasted pinups and imaginative stories of sex scandals that nonetheless enjoys unexcelled access to politicians because of its huge readership. Within the business community, Kohl's policies are backed by Capital and Wirtschafts Woche, magazines staffed by economists.

But publications on the left enjoy exceptional prestige. Clearly the most powerful is Spiegel, though it is also widely disliked for its unpleasantly dogmatic style. Its founder and publisher, Rudolf Augstein, 59, stridently argues that U.S. and West German interests inevitably are in conflict, particularly on the reunification of Germany. The weekly is by West German standards an enterprising investigative publication, and its ideology has not kept it from publishing stories that embarrass the Social Democrats. Last year Spiegel exposed payoffs to politicians, including SPD leaders, in exchange for tax breaks for the giant Flick conglomerate. More important, Spiegel has no real competitor in the country as a newsmagazine, and therefore is a favored recipient of political leaks. Spiegel is must reading in government and business circles.

Almost as influential as Spiegel on the left is Stern, which is both the most widely read of West Germany's four major pictorial magazines and the only one with serious, if erratic, journalistic ambitions. Stern was thrust into international notoriety in April as the publisher and purveyor of forged diaries purportedly written by Adolf Hitler. The diaries fiasco, which led to the ouster of two top editors, has cost the magazine about 10% of its circulation, an estimated $3.8 million in circulation and advertising income, and much of its credibility among fellow reporters.

Although the staff viewed the mismanagement of the diaries affair as a reason to claim greater control of the magazine's content, the Stern management installed a more conservative and prudent editor, Peter Scholl-Latour, a former television commentator. Says he: "We have readers who are not as far left as is sometimes thought. I do not want to bore them with too much ideology." Scholl-Latour describes the antimissile movement as "a fashionable tendency," and his view is having an impact. Though the magazine continues to report on the movement enthusiastically, an Aug. 4 cover showed a hand holding a rock and said, "Gewalt--nein danke"(Violence--no, thanks).

Also on the left are Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Zeit, a majority of reporters and commentators on West Germany's two major television networks, and many of the staff correspondents of the leading wire service, Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Left of center, but less partisan, is the Suddeutsche Zeitung (circ. 310,000), based in Munich, which spurns ideological zeal and is Germany's nearest equivalent to an independent centrist paper.

Broadcast journalism, which tends to be ponderous, pedagogical and visually dull, has less influence in West Germany than in the U.S. But it, too, is often outspokenly hostile to America. French Television Correspondent Michel Meyer reported in a study for the Aspen Institute, a U.S.-based nonprofit research center, that in almost two months of intensive viewing of West German television in late 1981, he "did not see a single broadcast that could be called positive or friendly toward the U.S., but numerous critical programs."

Television and radio reporting have a particular influence: while West German publications are not distributed inside

East Germany, except at tourist facilities, West German broadcast news reaches millions of East Germans. The anti-American tone in much of the reporting would hardly seem to enhance the image of the West. But one prominent left-wing West German editor points out that journalism critical of the U.S., whether in print or broadcast media, may unintentionally make positive points about life in the West. Says he: "West Germany is in effect saying that we can criticize our big brother while they cannot criticize theirs." The editor sums up: "It is more interesting to report controversially. Our correspondents can do it from the U.S., and it would be nice to do the same from Moscow, but we would risk expulsion." It is reassuring that leftist journalists recognize that difference between the Soviet Union and the U.S. But their coverage might seem to have more intellectual integrity if they reflected that awareness more fully.

-- By William A. Henry III

Reported by Gary Lee/Bonn

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