Hitler Sells — About the Value of News
A little research on “Google News” reveals, that the first days of November 2016 apparently couldn’t get along without coverage of Hitler and the mentioning of his name in the headlines.
11/1/16: “Berlin Opens Exhibition Regarding Hitler’s Bunker”:
11/2/16: “Unsolved Love Story — How Important Unity Mitford Was to Hitler”:
11/3/16: “What Happened Inside Hitler’s Secret Polar Bunker?”:
11/4/16: “The Last Heroes Against Hitler”:
11/5/16: “Herbie and Hitler”
These are only a few examples from german media, in a wide political range from very left-winged (“neues Deutschland”) to rather conservative (“FOCUS”), that illustrate how it is possible for authors to draw a line from almost every topic (economy, history, politics, culture, art, environment, local news etc.) to Hitler. But don’t believe talking and writing about Hitler, in every possible circumstances, was an exclusively german trait:
From today, 7/11:
Or this “beauty”:
Studying all these articles raise some serious questions about the value of news and who determines it. Presumably, those articles, even if they don’t actually deal with Hitler, seem to profit from his name in the Headline. The article last mentioned, was listed among the 10 most read articles of the day, on the BBC-Homepage (19:38 CET). Apparently, this couldn’t have happened because of the density of new and relevant information within the text. Frankly said, the webspace in which the article was published, couldn’t have contained less information, if it just featured two pages of porn-ads.
So what makes anybody consider such reports as valuable news? Remember: It had been posted on the online page of a public funded media corporation in Britain. The answer to this could be: money. Additional money, gained by clicks and online advertisements. So the term of “News Values” (see Wikipedia) gets perverted into “valuable news”, which are in contrast to the first, a product that can be sold. The monetary value of News like these are defined by their demand and the relatively low amount of work, which is needed to produce them (no expensive live-covering, no great distances, not much research, nobody is put into danger while reporting, etc.).
One could argue, that this is a very democratic way of presenting news, by just offering what is demanded — even if it’s stories about Hitler. But does the consumer really have a choice, or can repeating pictures and stories affect his overall watching-habits and make him “get used” to this kind of reporting?
Of course it costs money to design “relevant” reports, which encourage consumers to critical discourse, uncover truth, deliver information about significant events that could affect many people’s lives and help readers to keep aware of a problem for a long period of time. But even an article, who delivers all these things, can’t be assured of being read and reflected in a way, that justifies the effort. A crucial problem for any medium, which does not serve public interest at first (and for BBC).
One solution could possibly be, to put reports about serious problems and urgent information into context with “clickbait”-headlines, as the Indian Times apparently tried, in order to focus more attention to this matter. But as seen in this example, Hitler comparisons aren’t appropiate. Never.
By comparing the pollution in Indian cities to the industrial killing of millions, the article trivialises the shoah and can’t possibly be seen as helpful — even if the topic of pollution urgently needs to be discussed in India.
