When sensational reporters want to report seriously
What used to be accepted with a shake of the head and no further attention is now a media-wide discussion. Yet there really are more important things to do than to denounce the aberrations of one's own industry. For no one wants to know that a viral disease of the lungs presumably transmitted to humans by bats is not a threat to humanity. One would have to span the arc from the sentence of a Louis, Lance or Neill Armstrong, what is humanity on the moon at all, to Goethe, who said that there is no humanity, only people, to the question of what man is doing on the moon at all and whether he has ever been there.
Is a virus a conspiracy or rather to express that its existence is denied?
Historically, any disease is a joke given today's research developments. Every day more people die of hunger - but that only affects poor countries; every day more people die of the consequences of HIV infection - but nobody cares about that anymore; every day more people die of the toxic effects of smoke inhalation - but who wanted to ban smoking because of that? Who is afraid that a media hype has been created which - funnily enough - has spread more widely than its content? When the first coronavirus of this kind appeared in 2003, smartphones, fakenews and alternative facts were proportionally just as widespread. No one would have thought of pulling the emergency brake on the entire global economy because of it. Today, the acoustic expression of opinion is already considered an attack worthy of punishment and is potentially politically incorrect. Unlike social media, where nothing is questioned and everything is redistributed.
In the past, news was spread orally. Today, this is hazardous to health, provided the speaker is breathing himself. Not even a face is required to radiate seriousness and listening in itself is already a challenge that smartphone users are no longer up to (cf. phone phobia).
It is enough for a short text that is as illustrated as possible, which must not be scrolled under any circumstances because that requires too much activity and interruption of the reader's attention (even the thought of swiping to the right or left on Tinder leads to the limit of one's decision-making ability), to appear on the display of one's smartphone in order to be credible. After all, how could misinformation be displayed on the device that the average high school graduate never puts down out of reach of his hand?
Abitur and education - do they still go together today?
Just as tropical drought is a contradiction, education and school - i.e. schooling - no longer seems to be what it should be: the ability to acquire knowledge in a self-initiated way, to abstract from different sources in order to be able to develop one's own opinions. The next step would already be science, namely to research these theses in order to prove or disprove them. This is what consumers expect journalists to have already done with 'news'; but how is that possible when new 'facts' have to be available every two minutes? The only solution is to fall back on what Baron von Münchhausen already found as a solution; to conform to the ductus of the audience and deliver what they expect: catchwords with populist tips that could be true. It has long ceased to be a perversion whether the attack on the World Trade Center towers was a planned quick demolition because of the buildings' asbestos-containing fire protection, but that we can imagine that it might have been.