The good column: At its peak

I’m not sure whether, in a better future, many journalists shouldn’t be employed in jobs in which language is no longer an obstacle: butchering, cleaning sewer pipes or writing bestsellers, for example.

There has been uninhibited talk on the internet, on the radio and on television for years, giving one the impression that the “total dumbing down of Germany”, which was once called for by the APPD, is a process that has already been completely and extremely successfully completed: to the Mixture of helpless advertising babble, steel-hard propaganda and pure idiot language (“contact person”, “progressive coalition”, “democracy check”, “window of tolerance”, “customer experience”), which is practiced freely and so far with impunity in the local media, are the listeners and Viewers are so used to it that they, of course without noticing it, speak as if they were broken internet bots or clones of Markus Lanz. Even students of German language and literature today ask themselves which new, unknown influencer “Emilia Galotti” actually is, or think that “Green Heinrich” is a sex toy. Infantilization and ideologization are omnipresent and complement each other beautifully, not just in the media world.

But of course it is worst among press people and in newspaper editorial offices, where a pronounced lack of thinking, reading and writing is practically a requirement for employment. Exacerbating the industry’s usual combination of fussiness and semi-literacy, so to speak, there is also the tendency of numerous employees to apply terms known from the cosmos of eroticism in an inflationary manner to the sphere of politics: it is not uncommon to read about the fact that a… The economic or foreign minister “goes on a cozy path” towards some totalitarian regime, that one party “goes to bed” with another or “wants to go to bed with it”, that the federal government “cuddles up” with the car lobby or at party conferences “Cuddles are distributed” or “administered”.

Cuddling, cuddling, caressing, going to bed together: Where does this widespread petting obsession among editors and so-called freelance press people come from? Is there a subconscious, unrealized need for an intensive exchange of affection with politicians at play here? Is there an increased interest among those working in the media business in erotic play and in performing preparatory acts for sexual intercourse with political officials of the (German) state? “Cuddling course”, “cuddling course”, “cuddling policy”: Does anyone who writes like that perhaps have a new kind of sexual inclination, in which a nagging desire for physical touch from members of the German Bundestag and a deep desire for navigation techniques merge? In the constant search for the longed-for oxytocin kick, the “Spiegel” or “Welt” editorialist, when he looks deep inside and is honest with himself, really wants nothing other than to touch Björn Höcke down below or .tenderly scratch Ali Khamenei’s beard or balls?

It will remain a mystery until science (psychology? brain research? linguistics? journalism?) deals intensively with such questions. One thing is certain: down-to-earth language images that come from the area of ​​sadomasochistic sexuality are far less popular in German journalism, which is why you won’t find headlines like “German Economy: Bootlicking with the Mullahs.”

One thing is certain: there will be no shortage of erotically charged (and other) newspaper phrases in German journalism in the future. Although as far as their distribution is concerned, the – hmm – temporary peak may have been reached.