Forger from the scaffold
The basic problem with journalism today is not the liars, but the bores. And clinical clones like the Wolffers executor NZZ am Sonntag. A plea for less ethics and more aesthetics.
Column The basic problem with journalism today is not the liars, but the bores. And clinical clones like the Wolffers executor NZZ am Sonntag. A plea for less ethics and more aesthetics.
Yes, Mbwana, with the Wolffers case another high point was reached in the creeping decline of the media, the blablabla...
This is how the obituaries read when another one of us is caught and liquidated: This time it was the editor-in-chief of the Jewish newspaper Aufbau, the New York-Swiss Lorenz Wolffers. He wrote an essay on September 11 in the SonntagsBlick under the name of a celebrity writer and invented an interview for the NZZ am Sonntag. His predecessors: Jayson Blair in the New York Times, Michael Born with his information programs on "10 to 10" and Tom Kummer, who invented Hollywood stars better than they invented themselves.
Those caught die an instant professional death - with an obituary written by themselves. The only thing they have left are their memoirs: Michael Born wrote them, Jayson Blair is working on a screenplay, and the cleverest of them all, Tom Kummer, had already published his confessions as a novel in advance.
For everyone else, the hour of indignation and ethics has come. The media concerned are horrified, apologize and consider "legal action". The competition writes (gleefully) essays about the degeneration of journalism: about quality-damaging speed, forced sensationalism, neglected fact checks and dwindling credibility.
What is particularly suspicious about the ritual is the knee-jerk head-down call with which fakers are condemned. In the dozens of articles that appeared about Tom Kummer and his "borderline" journalism, not a single one spoke out in his favor. Kummer had put such beautiful sentences like "My character is like a really bad neighborhood in Los Angeles - my mind says I shouldn't go there" into the mouths of stupid Hollywood stars. And thus pleasantly improved reality. And as far as Lorenz Wolffers is concerned, he hasn't made the world much worse by writing another Nine-Eleven essay.
The really disturbing thing about exposed colleagues is another, often suppressed fact: we are in the fiction business. Even if the facts are true. Any reasonably talented journalist knows how to use dramaturgy, adjectives, quotes, etc. to spin stories one way or the other.
If Socrates had been a journalist, his credo would have been: "I know that I half know." None of us are experts on even one of his articles. Journalists are children
in the dark. Sure, facts are a wonderful source of inspiration. But what is more important is what we make of them. Our job is not to seek the truth, but to tell stories.
Nevertheless, liars are a serious problem in our profession. No, not the interview and essay fakers. But those who spread a far more perfidious untruth: that the world is a boring place, full of routine, without alternatives, surprises and imagination. They are the gangsters who write communiqués in indirect speech, editorials without research and reports without curiosity. And then, of course, the gang bosses: "What is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?" asked Bert Brecht seriously. The same applies: What is the falsification of an NZZ am Sonntag article against the publication of the NZZ am Sonntag? Is it not a mere commercial clone of the SonntagsZeitung? A weekly crime with no respect for the reader, no line and no idea of its own?
It is not the sensationalists but the bores who damage journalistic credibility. Not the few fakers, but the army of the deaf and blind. What we need are honest liars who can tell stories - an aesthetic, not an ethic of journalism.
> Constantin Seibt is editor for politics and economics at WochenZeitung (WoZ).
Yes, Mbwana, with the Wolffers case another high point was reached in the creeping decline of the media, the blablabla...
This is how the obituaries read when another one of us is caught and liquidated: This time it was the editor-in-chief of the Jewish newspaper Aufbau, the New York-Swiss Lorenz Wolffers. He wrote an essay on September 11 in the SonntagsBlick under the name of a celebrity writer and invented an interview for the NZZ am Sonntag. His predecessors: Jayson Blair in the New York Times, Michael Born with his information programs on "10 to 10" and Tom Kummer, who invented Hollywood stars better than they invented themselves.
Those caught die an instant professional death - with an obituary written by themselves. The only thing they have left are their memoirs: Michael Born wrote them, Jayson Blair is working on a screenplay, and the cleverest of them all, Tom Kummer, had already published his confessions as a novel in advance.
For everyone else, the hour of indignation and ethics has come. The media concerned are horrified, apologize and consider "legal action". The competition writes (gleefully) essays about the degeneration of journalism: about quality-damaging speed, forced sensationalism, neglected fact checks and dwindling credibility.
What is particularly suspicious about the ritual is the knee-jerk head-down call with which fakers are condemned. In the dozens of articles that appeared about Tom Kummer and his "borderline" journalism, not a single one spoke out in his favor. Kummer had put such beautiful sentences like "My character is like a really bad neighborhood in Los Angeles - my mind says I shouldn't go there" into the mouths of stupid Hollywood stars. And thus pleasantly improved reality. And as far as Lorenz Wolffers is concerned, he hasn't made the world much worse by writing another Nine-Eleven essay.
The really disturbing thing about exposed colleagues is another, often suppressed fact: we are in the fiction business. Even if the facts are true. Any reasonably talented journalist knows how to use dramaturgy, adjectives, quotes, etc. to spin stories one way or the other.
If Socrates had been a journalist, his credo would have been: "I know that I half know." None of us are experts on even one of his articles. Journalists are children
in the dark. Sure, facts are a wonderful source of inspiration. But what is more important is what we make of them. Our job is not to seek the truth, but to tell stories.
Nevertheless, liars are a serious problem in our profession. No, not the interview and essay fakers. But those who spread a far more perfidious untruth: that the world is a boring place, full of routine, without alternatives, surprises and imagination. They are the gangsters who write communiqués in indirect speech, editorials without research and reports without curiosity. And then, of course, the gang bosses: "What is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?" asked Bert Brecht seriously. The same applies: What is the falsification of an NZZ am Sonntag article against the publication of the NZZ am Sonntag? Is it not a mere commercial clone of the SonntagsZeitung? A weekly crime with no respect for the reader, no line and no idea of its own?
It is not the sensationalists but the bores who damage journalistic credibility. Not the few fakers, but the army of the deaf and blind. What we need are honest liars who can tell stories - an aesthetic, not an ethic of journalism.
> Constantin Seibt is editor for politics and economics at WochenZeitung (WoZ).
