Ich bin mir unseins, ob das Augenmerk auf Titelcover günstig ist. Die deutsche Toleranzschwelle über Satire und Übertreibung in Bild ist höher als die der amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit. Wir nennen Politiker der gegnerischen Partei nicht Terroristen oder Landesverräter, aber es ist völlig normal höchste Repräsentanten des Landes mit dem Kopf im Arsch zu zeigen. Die Polemik auf den Stern und Spiegel Covern fällt da gar nicht auf. Ich bin versucht die angeprangerten deutschen Cover in eine Reihe mit dem des New Yorkers zu stellen und die Sache zu vergessen, andererseits gäbe ich damit das Recht auf, mich über den Axis of Weasels Cover der New York Post aufzuregen, welches ich gerne behalten würde. Die Medienkritik Seite hat ihren Nutzen, und sei es bloß als Übung um die Augen für das zu schärfen, was einem direkt vor der Nase liegt.
Dies ist ein vernünftigerer Erklärungsversuch:
Interesting thought experiment: What if you were a foreign correspondent...?
Imagine you are an American correspondent in Germany. You are encouraged by your editors to report only the most extreme, outrageous, strange and dark sides of German society. Your publication chooses to ignore the 97% of issues that bring Germans and Americans together and instead focus on the 3% that most divide the two nations - such as attitudes towards prostitution, social welfare, guns, etc. This seedy sensationalism sells - and that is exactly what your editors are after. For that reason, they also strongly encourage you to write whatever you can on Neo-Nazi violence - not because the issue is genuinely troubling - (and it is) - but because it brings good ratings and reaffirms your readership's dark stereotypes of the Vaterland.
Beyond that - your editors oblige you to bring stories only on a narrow band of pet issues that they have predetermined are of "interest" to the readership. (In fact, you may have been specially selected for your job because you have a an ideological propensity to dislike Germany and favor stories that make Germany look bad.) When you arrive in Berlin, you discover that Germany isn't quite the awful place you expected and - because you are a free spirit - the urge is great to report on the many complex aspects of German society. Predictably, however, your editors discourage any independent ideas that might shed a different (you might say balanced) light on things.
The pet issues and big politics are all they want. In particular, the editors want to demonstrate that Germany is a nation infatuated with pornography, cursed by extreme alcoholism and blighted by racist attitudes towards non-Germans. Every other week - if things are slow - the boss pressures you to bring a story on another hopeless unemployed wretch in East-Berlin desperate to get out of the country. He just won't publish your more "upbeat" stories or even critical stories that fall outside the narrow band of pet issues.
The editors supplement your work by sprinkling-in stories cut-and-pasted from news wires on Germans behaving badly worldwide. You eventually realize that intellectual honesty takes a distant backseat to the pet-issue template devised by your editors. Making Germans and Germany look bad at all costs - to reaffirm the stereotypes and political leanings of readers - is no longer something you can question without risking your job.
Not surprisingly, the most "self-critical" Germans - those with a particular talent for shamelessly bashing their own nation and people - are held up as heroic dissenters and showered with awards by your publication and others like it.
Finally - because quite a few other publications share the same general ideology of your own and follow the same pattern of reporting - it is not beyond the pale for your editors to proclaim that you represent the "mainstream" of American media and that you are largely fair and unbiased in reporting on Germany.
Ich würde hinzufügen, dass die Gemeinsamkeiten zweier Kulturen zu besprechen generell weder spannend noch erhellend ist, und wäre ich Reporter in einem fremden Land würde auch ich die Unterschiede aufspüren, in deren Licht wir wir unsere eigene Identität zur Obduktion offenlegen.
