It is all about being the first

I know that almost one month has passed since Anis Amri steered a lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin, but nevertheless I want to write about the news coverage concerning this horrible action because it still bothers me.
Before anything was known for sure, news media spoke about a terror attack and compared it to the similar case in Nizza last summer. Even though this comparison was, in retrospect, legitimate, news media should be careful with drawing such a comparison in these unclear and confusing time we live in; it should not needlessly stoke fears without knowing anything certain.
The same thing can be said about the assumption concerning the offender’s identity. Just a few hours after the attack, assumptions circulated in the news media and the internet although nobody knew anything for sure. I want to enlarge upon one of these assumptions. The picture at the top of this entry shows a screenshot of a tweet by the Tagesschau which was posted only twelve hours after the attack: What bothers me most about this tweet it the last subitem. Such a mistake must not be made by a respectable television transmitter. Particularly a television transmitter like the ARD and it’s news broadcasts like the Tagesschau should attach importance to only spread facts and do not make assumptions, especially when reporting about such a touchy and difficult issue. Otherwise, the news coverage’s quality suffers and fears are stoked. The Tagesschau already did not act really professionally in the case of the raped and murdered student in Freiburg and, as for me, it lost much of it’s reliability with it’s careless news coverage about these two cases. Also because the assumptions expressed in the tweet turned out to be wrong.
In today’s news coverage, being first seems to be more important than to report thoughtful, conscientious and accurate. But this is the wrong way. Sentences like “The situation is very unclear and we do not want to spread assumptions before we know anything for sure” would have been appropriate when reporting about the attack in Berlin. Stefan Leifert, correspondent for the ZDF in Brussels, summarized it quite well in a tweet. One can only hope that this slogan will be taken to heart by some more journalists in the future.