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Germany’s Bild goes soft on refugees
Critical blog says the red top’s campaign is hypocritical.
BERLIN — The top-selling German daily Bild, long derided by its critics as a sensationalist redoubt of populist posturing, has taken them by surprise with an impassioned campaign to help asylum-seekers from war zones like Syria.
Bild’s detractors are not necessarily convinced, and a German media blogger called the right-leaning paper “very hypocritical” on this issue. But the “Wir helfen” (“We’re helping,”) campaign contrasts with the strident tones of conservative politicians and media in other EU countries — especially Hungary — who argue that the refugees are mostly “economic migrants” in search of a higher income rather than shelter from violence and oppression.
“This crisis has taken on a historic scale, and there has not been a historic answer to it, so far,” Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of the paper’s online platform Bild.de, told POLITICO when asked about the motivation for the campaign.
Bild is published by Axel Springer, co-owner of POLITICO’s European edition.
Since its launch, many of the newspaper’s staff — including editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann — have changed their Twitter photo to the logo of the campaign.
Celebrities and politicians such as Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel from the Social Democrats (SPD) and Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives have posed for photos with the “Wir helfen” logo.
Like many papers around the world, Bild’s Thursday edition dedicated a full page to images of a three-year-old Syrian boy lying dead on a beach in Turkey, after the boat trying to take him and 10 other people to Greece sank off the Turkish coast.
With a print circulation of 2.1 million copies and 18.8 million unique users of its digital edition, Bild’s coverage of individual acts of solidarity with refugees by ordinary Germans and its editorials encouraging readers to get involved in the campaign have the potential to mobilize the German public — who are already largely sympathetic to the plight of genuine asylum seekers.
In a mid-August survey by public broadcaster ARD, 93 percent of Germans polled said they considered it “the right thing” to grant asylum to people fleeing from a war or civil war. Only 28 percent said that Germany should accept people that seek refuge from economic hardship.
Bild’s campaign comes at a time of intense public debate in Germany and beyond about the difference between what the media here calls Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge — economic refugees — and people who come to the country to escape from war.
Merkel visited a shelter for aslyum-seekers near Dresden last week after anti-immigrant groups staged a violent protest against the arrival of more migrants. It is an issue that has polarized the German right and spawned a grassroots movement, PEGIDA, which sees Muslim migrants as the source of a potentially dangerous culture clash.
Founded in the early 1950s in Hamburg, Bild is itself a polarizing blend of outsized headlines, strident opinions, pictures of topless women and intrepid war reporting.
Toppled a president
In the 1960s it campaigned against West German Chancellor’s Willy Brandt’s rapprochement with the communist German Democratic Republic. In the 2000s, the paper was running virulent campaign against alleged welfare cheats and more recently it has taken a tough line on the bailouts to keep Greece in the eurozone, portraying them as a waste of German taxpayers’ money.
In 2012, Christian Wulff resigned as German president after BILD broke the story that he had accepted a loan from a businessman’s wife and had tried to prevent the newspaper from reporting about it.
Even so, expert Hans-Jürgen Arlt, who has co-authored three BILD-critical studiesfor Otto-Brenner-foundation, funded by the German metalworkers’ union IG Metall, believes that “BILD by itself isn’t that influential — at least, less influential than the publication likes to think.”
“BILD always has an impact on politics when it manages to get other mass media to pick up its issues and messages, for instance in the case of former president Wulff,” he said.
Its current advocacy for refugees’ rights is not without its critics either.
In mid-July, a German media blog dedicated to documenting the mistakes of the tabloid and other German media, published an article accusing BILD of hypocrisy on the migrant issue.
BILDBlog said the paper had previously fueled resentment against refugees by publishing selective factors, or distorting them, in order to print catchy headlines, like in an article from September 2014 about paramedics who had begun to wear vests to protect themselves from attacks by asylum seekers — a report that BILDBlog depicted as flawed.
“For years, BILD has been playing with fire and contributing to fuel an anti-refugee atmosphere,” Mats Schönauer of BILDBlog told POLITICO. “The fact that they now did this about-face is very hypocritical.”
BILD’s Julian Reichelt responded on Facebook, rejecting the criticism, defending the paper’s record on the migrant story and calling the bloggers “desk-bound ideologists.”
“Unlike all the critics, who pick out half sentences and say, ‘This is where resentment and anger are being fueled,’ we have been reporting for years about what eventually led to this refugee crisis, for instance what is happening in Syria,” he said.
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