End of the cultural reserves
The last species of journalist to be hit by the red pen are the noble feathers. The re-dimensioning of many of the complacent feature pages is overdue and also an opportunity for a fresh start.
Column The last species of journalist to be hit by the red pen is now also the noble feathers. The re-dimensioning of many of the complacent feature pages is overdue and also an opportunity for a fresh start. Some excited feature writers, who are currently complaining about a new "structural change in the public sphere", would like us to believe that a central place of intellectual debate is in danger. If the cultural supplements of the quality newspapers only offer half the length of six to eight pages a day, the self-understanding of the republic is at stake, they cry out. Despite all understanding for the attempt of colleagues to elevate the crisis-related threat to their own jobs to the status of a challenge for society as a whole, one should not take the culturally critical whining seriously. After all, the crisis of the feuilleton did not just begin when job and page cuts were implemented in the protected zones of newspaper culture. Long before it became a victim of cost-calculators, the feuilleton in the German quality press had ruined itself.
In sovereign ignorance of the business model, the expansion of the scope beyond any reasonable measure was seen as a gain in reflective competence, whereas in reality only the once booming advertising market required editorial additions. The newly gained space was filled with those elitist distinguishing features that had made the leading feuilletons unreadable on some days. In often embarrassing overestimation of themselves, authors stylized themselves as generalists who liked to shrilly contradict the leading article or the business section from the back pages of their paper. It is not the contradiction that is inappropriate, but the cluelessness with which the "J'accuse" pose is struck here. Opinion on everything was and is the order of the day, not informed analysis. What counts is the effective gesture that secures "discourse sovereignty" for a few days. Thus was born the "debate feuilleton", which has damaged the reputation and significance of intellectual debate more than the spitfire resentment ever could.
Because in order to set the topics of public discussion for a few days, people were prepared to betray what feuilletonism actually stands for. The pinnacle of this disrepute was marked by a Frankfurt newspaper which, in this noisy competition for attention, did not even shy away from denouncing a writer: the inability to read was combined in a frightening way with the will to go as far as the journalistic execution of an author. This infamy, defiantly justified by its authors to this day, has permanently disenchanted the new feuilleton: it was nothing other than a brazen attempt to subject cultural life to the principles of tabloid journalism. Today, you can learn more about the state of society from advertising than from detached feuilletons. Anyone interested in reliable cultural reporting has therefore long since turned away in disgust from the riotous feuilletons. And even services such as literary criticism are hardly accepted any more. A few sentences with subjective judgments of taste are enough if they are spoken on television by a credible figure. And we are supposed to worry when the still page-long remnants of pretentious trivia are trimmed down? Let's wish them all to hell so that we can think again about what newspapers have to do with culture.
> Heribert Seifert writes
regularly for the NZZ about the
German media landscape.
In sovereign ignorance of the business model, the expansion of the scope beyond any reasonable measure was seen as a gain in reflective competence, whereas in reality only the once booming advertising market required editorial additions. The newly gained space was filled with those elitist distinguishing features that had made the leading feuilletons unreadable on some days. In often embarrassing overestimation of themselves, authors stylized themselves as generalists who liked to shrilly contradict the leading article or the business section from the back pages of their paper. It is not the contradiction that is inappropriate, but the cluelessness with which the "J'accuse" pose is struck here. Opinion on everything was and is the order of the day, not informed analysis. What counts is the effective gesture that secures "discourse sovereignty" for a few days. Thus was born the "debate feuilleton", which has damaged the reputation and significance of intellectual debate more than the spitfire resentment ever could.
Because in order to set the topics of public discussion for a few days, people were prepared to betray what feuilletonism actually stands for. The pinnacle of this disrepute was marked by a Frankfurt newspaper which, in this noisy competition for attention, did not even shy away from denouncing a writer: the inability to read was combined in a frightening way with the will to go as far as the journalistic execution of an author. This infamy, defiantly justified by its authors to this day, has permanently disenchanted the new feuilleton: it was nothing other than a brazen attempt to subject cultural life to the principles of tabloid journalism. Today, you can learn more about the state of society from advertising than from detached feuilletons. Anyone interested in reliable cultural reporting has therefore long since turned away in disgust from the riotous feuilletons. And even services such as literary criticism are hardly accepted any more. A few sentences with subjective judgments of taste are enough if they are spoken on television by a credible figure. And we are supposed to worry when the still page-long remnants of pretentious trivia are trimmed down? Let's wish them all to hell so that we can think again about what newspapers have to do with culture.
> Heribert Seifert writes
regularly for the NZZ about the
German media landscape.
