Davids Medienkritik notes a study from a German media watchdog that comes to a rather amazing conclusion: Arab broadcasters report more positively on Iraq’s elections than German media.

The German public television news are spreading, with their news selection, a climate that the parliamentary elections in Iraq could not fulfill their function. With that, they stand in contradiction to the position of the UN that Kofi Annan presented on the basis of UN election observers as well as in contradiction to their colleagues at Arab TV broadcasters from Al Jazeera to Al Arabia. That is shown by the current study of the media research institute Medien Tenor. The Bonn scientists found out that “heute journal” and “Tagesthemen” reported negatively nearly 80 percent of the time when the validity of the election was spoken about in cases evaluated in the time period that the study was carried out (17-26 January 2005). Marietta Slomka (heute journal anchorwoman, 19 January): “How should free, equal and general elections be held under these conditions?” ZDF correspondent Luc Walpot even doubted that the election was a decision on political goals: “In light of the daily threats, kidnappings, bombs and murders, the interest in the election programs is tiny. (…) The placards will not set the tone, fear will be decisive.” The “Tagesthemen” also expressed themselves very critically: The bombing terror threatens the election process, reported Joerg Armbruster.

A completely different picture was given to the viewers of the leading Arab TV broadcasters Al Jazeera, Al Manar, Al Arabia, etc. on the situation in Iraq. They chose different news from Iraq and, on the same day (19 January,) spread a positive estimate of the election’s legitimacy among their viewers in 100% of the cases. “The trend of the reports from ARD and ZDF (the two main state funded stations) correspond to the extremely one-sided pattern of reporting that we have observed in the public state-funded broadcasters since Schroeder’s political change of course towards the US in the end phase of the 2002 German national elections,” according to Roland Schatz, the Editor-in-Chief of Media Tenor International. “The German public is being presented a situation in Iraq twice as negatively portrayed as it was under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Do dead Iraqis count for Tagesthemen and heute journal first then when Saddam Hussein isn’t responsible for them?”