Press Council reprimands Tamedia editorial team for misleading quote
The Press Council partially approves a complaint against the Tamedia editorial team. The editorial team had foisted a quote on the mastermind of a coronavirus demonstration in Berlin. However, he had never said this.
The criticized passage was in a text about Ken Jebsen, who was presented as the mastermind behind the demonstrations against the corona measures in Berlin. This text stated that Jebsen "serves anti-Semitic resentments against the alleged 'Jewish capitalism'".
The term "Jewish capitalism" was placed in quotation marks, although no evidence was presented that Jebsen had ever used it. In a reply to a private individual from Switzerland, Tamedia confirmed that Jebsen did not actually use this term.
Tamedia argued that "Jewish capitalism" was not intended as a quote from Jebsen, but merely as an example of the anti-Semitic resentment Jebsen serves up.
Opinion distorted
In the opinion of the Press Council, the Tamedia editorial team had thus violated the rights and obligations of journalists. Anyone who puts a term that describes a person's way of thinking in quotation marks is attributing that term to that person.
Tamedia had thus distorted the opinion expressed by Jebsen, the Press Council announced on Friday. However, the Press Council sees no problem with the statement that Jebsen's online platform KenFM had called for "barely veiled violence against a TV team from the satirical 'heute-show'" in the run-up to a demonstration. (SDA)
