In public service broadcasting, hardly a day goes by without the program giving cause to be suspicious when it comes to the information provided. A more recent example can be found in ARD’s “Report from Berlin” last Sunday.
It was about the dispute about citizen income, which is now in the mediation committee after it was rejected by the Federal Council. In the “Report from Berlin” it was the number one topic, with a correspondent’s contribution, two long interviews – Markus Söder spoke for the Union, Johannes Vogel for the FDP – and a very strange, shall we say, “blemish”?
What did Merz and Frei laugh about?
The article showed an excerpt of the speech that the leader of the Greens parliamentary group, Britta Haßelmann, gave in the debate on citizens’ income in the Bundestag. In it, she accused opposition leader Friedrich Merz of being socially cold: Anyone who flies to the party in a private jet can hardly put themselves in the position of a single parent, said Hasselmann.
In contrast, the “Report from Berlin” showed Merz and next to him the parliamentary manager of the Union faction, Thorsten Frei, in their seats in the plenary hall – smirking. This was followed by a recording of Merz and his wife in the propeller plane with which they had flown to Christian Lindner’s wedding on Sylt.
However, the picture of Merz and Frei did not show the reaction of the two in the Bundestag to Haßelmann’s accusation of coldness. They made rather indignant expressions, as you can see with Phoenix. The two started to smirk when Haßelmann claimed elsewhere: “Friedrich Merz fuels social envy without end, but here in Parliament he is pinching today.”
Baha Jamous, head of communications at a fintech company and former campaign advisor for the CDU in Saxony, drew attention to this on Twitter. He called the process “framing”. In this case, the frame, i.e. the narrative arc, provided for the editing of the “Report from Berlin” consists of showing Friedrich Merz as someone who is only amused by the accusation of social indifference. The Twitter user Clara *Optimism Officer* Nathusius a.
The joke is that the article denied itself. Because the text said that the government and the opposition had just started a riot – “unworthy envy debates on both sides”. A political scientist also explained that the Union had to upgrade its content and be careful that everything did not always focus on Friedrich Merz: Quod erat demonstrandum.
The editors’ explanation of the image manipulation came via Twitter and fell pretty limp from: “In the report from Berlin from November 13th, 2022, a wrong picture was used in the article about the dispute over citizen’s income. We apologize for this and will correct the image in the post and re-upload it to the media library.” The new version naturally includes the image of Merz at the controls of the small aircraft.