- Post author
By Uwe Froschauer
Contribution date
February 17, 2025
By Uwe Froschauer
For power-hungry people, it has never been as easy as it is today to steer the mass of people in the desired direction. Those who can control people’s thoughts and behaviors ultimately rule the world.
New information technologies, the knowledge of manipulation strategies and manipulation techniques, as well as mind control and behavioral control by the news media, which are in the hands of less power-obsessed, mostly mentally ill people, are creating unprecedented opportunities for manipulating the masses. In addition, the news media are in the hands of a few power-obsessed, mostly mentally ill people.
According to the German Interstate Broadcasting Treaty, the mission of the public broadcasting corporations (ÖRR) is to act as a factor in the process of free individual and public opinion-forming and thereby to meet the democratic, social and cultural needs of society.
But do they? They are gradually turning out to be the mouthpiece of the government. They are less and less successful in differentiating facts and opinions and, in my opinion, are often deliberately not sought. Critical voices from employees of the mainstream media regarding the one-sided reporting are nipped in the bud, the critics are defamed, bullied or dismissed.
One-sided, government-compliant reporting comes at the expense of the pluralism of opinion that is so important for a democracy. With the help of the mainstream media, dissenters are defamed, discredited and, in some cases, labelled.
Most mainstream media reflect the reality dictated from above without any significant comparison of reality. There is hardly any distance from the state and independence in the provision of information, which is supposed to lead to the formation of opinion of the population that is as uninfluenced as possible — not polarizing.
The mass media are firmly in the hands of the elites. They use their language organs — the media — to achieve their goals. The media — their propaganda organs — are their most important and effective instrument for establishing a new world order, which is by no means everyone’s cup of tea. 99 percent of the world’s population will certainly not be happy if they no longer own anything in 2030, as Klaus Schwab, the (formal) founder of the World Economic Forum, predicted and aspires to.
The possession of the media is the strongest weapon of the elites. M.A. Verick once wrote the following:
“The most dangerous weapons of mass destruction are the mass media. Because they destroy people’s spirit, creativity and courage and replace them with fear, mistrust and doubt.”
The real problem is that the elites have used the media to shape a worldview that reflects the supposed, “obvious” reality to the masses.
The remote-controlled herd dances to the tune of the elites and their political puppets, believing that their opinion on this and that topic is their own product. The term “media-visible” would be better than “obvious” because the media let us see the world through glasses — in the spirit of the elites. The media we buy determine our “reality”. They determine what we should know, how we should evaluate the “facts” conveyed, what conclusions we should draw from them and how we should behave.
And of course we believe that everything would have grown on our own crap. My ass! The perfect example of a worldwide alignment of opinions and behaviors may have been the “Corona crisis”, which never was one, but was stylized as one by the media. The masses kept their distance, put on masks, even in places where they were not mandatory, and locked themselves up and got vaccinated.
Manipulation through selection and falsification of information
If certain information is particularly emphasized, statements are reinforced by unconfirmed data, important information is simply omitted, only people are invited to a talk show who basically hold similar opinions and only discuss details, or “normal” people are interviewed on the street who actually belong to a party or a radio station, the influencer limits the opinion formation of the influenced person in his favor one.
Below are a few recent examples of interviews with people from the “people”. In January 2025 alone, the public media interviewed their own employees or politicians disguised as normal citizens about 90 times at “Demos against the Right”. Here are a few examples: Peter Jähnert (Die Linke), Hadija Haruna-Oelker (Hessischer Rundfunk, ARD), Henriette Frank (SPD), Jada Ladu, declared in an interview as a “student” (Jusos, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern).
More on this, see here
This clear violation of neutral reporting, as the ÖRR takes up the cause, is nothing new. However, this type of opinion-influencing reporting is becoming increasingly popular in journalistic circles that are no longer guided by ethical values.
The German journalist and television presenter Dunja Hayali explained the immigrant Saudi Arabian perpetrator of Magdeburg, Taleb Abdulmohsen, who has been living in Germany since 2006, who raced through the Christmas market in Magdeburg shortly before Christmas 2024, injuring almost 300 people and killing six — including a nine-year-old boy — in ZDF ‘s heute journalbecame an AfD sympathizer in front of an audience of millions — and at the same time accused Alice Weidel of instrumentalizing the act. Such a perfidious distortion of the facts in the compulsorily financed ÖRR is unacceptable.
Here are Hayali’s words:
“Alice Weidel not only came to mourn, but she gave a speech in which she abused victims and perpetrators for her ideology — at least that’s how critics see it. Almost a feat, because the perpetrator is — as of today — not an Islamist, but an AfD sympathizer.”
You have to give yourself that! Well, I haven’t taken this lady seriously for a long time, but millions of Tagesschau parrots will probably take this nonsense at face value and thus calm their “do-gooder” conscience, as well as satisfy their need for moral superiority.
According to a recording by the US RAir Foundation, the attacker himself described himself as a leftist and not a right-winger some time before his attack, which he explicitly emphasized.
Talib A. publicly announced in May 2024 that he expected to die this year. He also addressed his message, which was not taken seriously, directly to Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser via X. Even the mainstream reports on this message as an exception, and also on the fact that Saudi Arabia had warned German authorities about the suspect and that the assassin had already received an extradition request to Saudi Arabia. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, which is under the questionable leadership of Nancy Faeser, did nothing.
In the meantime, the Jena Institute of Criminal Investigation has filed a criminal complaint against the Magdeburg police for aiding and abetting murder and assault. Why not against the Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, who, in my opinion, is mainly responsible for the neglect and increase in crime in Germany? Thank God we will probably be freed from this anti-democratic person in federal politics in a few months, when another government takes over. Of course, it is questionable what will follow, especially since the mental and political mediocrity seems to be evenly distributed across the old parties Union, SPD, Greens and FDP.
A round of mostly like-minded people
Anyone who watches the talk shows and discussion rounds with Caren Miosga, Markus Lanz, Sandra Maischberger and so on must notice which “discussions” were held with which participants on these discourse squares about Corona, for example in Corona years. For example, five people were invited who basically had the same opinion, in accordance with the government, and only hacked into details in order to fool the viewer into believing that the discussants were pluralistic. And if a “pluralistic” dissident was really invited, the rest of the like-minded people made him so round that it was no longer solemn.
You may have seen Markus Lanz on June 2, 2022, when Ulrike Guérot, among others, was a guest. A low point in pluralistic opinion-forming! An example was made of the Bonn political science professor and bestselling author of the book “Wer schweigt, stimmt zu” (Who is silent, agrees), which is well worth reading, in order to take away their courage to open their mouths. She asked correct questions such as: What is the Ukraine conflict actually about? What are the respective interests?
What is the goal of the war? She spoke of ceasefires, negotiations, various wars such as the Russian war of aggression, the Ukrainian civil war, the information war and NATO’s proxy war against Russia, and said that the key to everything lies in the US. One to one my point of view, and in my opinion the “truth”. Ulrike Guérot’s demand to get to the origins of this conflict and build a path to peace should be the demand of every peace-loving person, shouldn’t it? Supporting a peace agreement in Ukraine does not make a person a Putin supporter, but only means that he does not want war and certainly not nuclear war.
Well, be that as it may, the mob in this “discussion round” has attacked her, tried to parade her, constantly interrupted her — which they did — and made her look like an anti-social. The Rhine-metal warmonger Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP) constantly brought out the moral cudgel and tried to portray Ulrike Guérot as heartless by arousing emotions. That was certainly well received by the herd! Mr. Lanz gave a few monologues and constantly interrupted Mrs. Guérot. Actually, it should make Ms. Guérot’s “interlocutors” blush in shame in retrospect.
The spectacle has once again shown how monistic public broadcasters and the majority of their “selected” guests are. Anyone who simply wants to understand what is happening is classified as a “Putin understander”, immediately defamed and labeled: Shame on you supporters of one-sided narratives!
ZDF program “Schlagabtausch” from February 6
On Thursday, February 6, 2025, it quickly became clear on the ZDF program “Schlagabtausch” that the studio audience comes predominantly from the left-wing political corner. At the presentation of the politicians, there was only applause for the Left Party chairman Jan van Aken and the Green Party leader Felix Banaszak. The other participants — Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), Christian Lindner (FDP), Tino Chrupalla (AfD) and Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) — did not clap. The assumption of a certain “smallness” and “one-sidedness” of the audience is obvious.
In the 90-minute discussion, the one-sided composition of the audience became increasingly clear. When Green Party chairman Banaszak insinuated that the FDP chancellor candidate Christian Lindner was adopting the stories and narratives of the AfD, and the Left Party leader van Aken Chrupalla attacked with the words “Now hold your right-wing fringe,” the quite young left-green audience, whose composition ZDF was aware of, as its editor Dominik Rzepka later admitted, cheered. “There were a relatively large number of spectators from HU Berlin and FU Berlin in the audience. These are two rather left-wing universities here in Berlin,” Rzepka said in the heute journal up:date. The broadcaster had “written to the universities separately” to get the studio full.
It’s not up to me to describe the audience as young and stupid, but as young, inexperienced and one-sided — that’s what I presume to do.
Many television viewers expressed criticism of the one-sided applause of the ZDF audience via X. Some accused the station of deliberate manipulation — which in my eyes it undoubtedly was. An X report also showed that in the ZDF live chat, blue and black hearts in appreciation of the AfD and Union were apparently deleted by the moderators — but green hearts remained.
heute broadcast from 3 February 2025
The ÖRR also manipulate by cleverly editing the recordings. Already three days before the show “Schlagabtausch” on February 3, 2025, ZDF behaved in a partisan manner, in my opinion. Friedrich Merz is shown in the ZDF report distancing himself and his party from the AfD with the following words: “There is no cooperation, there is no toleration, there is no minority government” and the like, highlighting his words with combative gestures. The next shot showed several party congress delegates sitting in their seats with their arms crossed and looking skeptical, commented on with the words “defiant approval of delegates from West and East”. However, this impression that the delegates would not stand behind Merz was by no means true, especially since live images of the party congress prove the opposite in the form of cheers for Merz’s distancing from the AfD.
I’m certainly not a fan of the CDU and Friedrich Merz, but to twist moods into the opposite through a manipulative film cut in order to deceive the viewer are the bottom drawer of the manipulation bag of tricks!
The media should describe politics and not make politics. And we also have to pay for this manipulation of opinion, this cheese, in order to keep the forcibly financed media alive.
The mainstream media, especially the ÖRR, are increasingly spreading misrepresentations and fake news, and less so the alternative media, as they are constantly accused of by politicians and their propaganda organs. Journalistic principles such as objectivity and neutrality hardly seem to interest the ÖRR anymore.
Caren Miosga on February 2, 2025
Caren Miosga discussed the Holocaust commemoration, the asylum vote in the Bundestag and the economic policy of the AfD with her guests, the AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel, the president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry Hildegard Müller and the deputy editor-in-chief of Die Welt, Robin Alexander.
After a short fade-in of pictures after the successful vote on the CDU’s motion on asylum issues in the Bundestag, the AfD, which was delighted with the result, was shown. Then Miosga’s question in the studio: “Ms. Weidel, what did you celebrate? That you have successfully demonstrated the Union?” The word “performed” alone has a manipulative character and awakens negative associations in the viewer.
Without further reference to Miosga’s poor performance, which was definitely inferior to Alice Weidel mentally, at least in this show, it should be noted that Ms. Miosga did exactly what she had previously accused Ms. Weidel of: She tried to show off Ms. Weidel at every suitable opportunity, but she did not succeed. She tried to throw Weidel off her game by constantly interrupting her. By asking questions about Auschwitz and a statement by Weidel about the “German cult of guilt”, Miosga tried to establish Weidel’s proximity to National Socialism, to which Weidel reacted confidently.
In the conversation with Alice Weidel, Ms. Miosga disregarded pretty much all the rules of a discussion, such as letting people finish and the like, and later in the round of four the most important rule of moderation: The moderator should be particularly active at the group steering level. He was supposed to stay out of the content as much as possible, but Miosga didn’t.
In my eyes, this was a very lousy performance by Caren Miosga, who, like her station, apparently did not understand what serious reporting is all about: impartiality, independence, independence from the state, objectivity, neutrality and pluralism of opinion.
Alice Weidel, who faced three opponents, did well, even if she was not always quite confident in economic issues — in terms of numbers, data, facts.
See here
Georg Restle, the opinion journalist
The ethicist of conviction Georg Restle, who never took objectivity and neutrality so seriously in his show Monitor , posted on January 6, 2025 on X:
“Shut up, Elon Musk! We don’t want your fascism in Europe!” (Shut up, Elon Musk! We don’t want your fascism in Europe!)
Interesting statement, Mr. Restle, especially since the left-green ministries under the leadership of incompetent and autocratic people like Nancy Faeser, Robert Habeck. Annalena Baerbock and Lisa Paus do not allow any opinions other than their own — a clear sign of fascism, isn’t it?
On April 9, 2024 — from minute 11.48 of the recorded program — Restle announced his opinion on the topic of violent crimes in Germany on the Tagesthemen. After a few introductory words about the fear in Germany in this regard, that fear has little to do with reality and that “the crime statistics once again have to serve for simple slogans”, these words follow:
“Knife-stabbing foreigners who attack German women — that’s how you can create a mood, especially on the right-wing fringe. However, this has little to do with the real general threat situation.”
With his further remarks that the proportion of foreigners has increased, and the statement based on it “put into perspective, the figures are anything but dramatic”, he tries to downplay the real background and conceal the real figures. See here
Georg Restle’s findings, which are not based on numbers, do not agree with the figures of the Police Statistics (PKS) and the Federal Police. Here is an excerpt from a report by the German Press Agency (dpa) on knife crimes and the “real threat situation”:
*”Since the beginning of 2020, knife attacks have been recorded in the PKS. According to the BKA, the background to the inclusion in the statistics is an increase in crimes involving the use of knives. The PKS cites a total of 8,951 knife attacks in connection with dangerous and serious bodily injury for 2023. In 2022, there were 8,160 cases and 7,071 the year before. In robbery offences, the police recorded 4,893 knife offences in 2023, compared to 4,195 in 2022 and a total of 3,060 cases in 2021.”
Federal Police differentiates according to nationality
In contrast to the BKA, the Federal Police, which is responsible for Germany’s external borders as well as train stations and airports, has been recording violent crimes in which a knife was used in its entry statistics since 2019 – and also mentions the nationality of suspects.
According to these statistics, in 2023, for example, there were 777 offences in which a knife was used at the German borders, near train stations and airports. In 2022, there were 591. For 2023, the statistics name 180 German suspects and 218 people of unknown origin. In addition, there are 216 non-German suspects. In 2022, by comparison, there were 169 German suspects, as well as 169 people of unexplained and 174 of non-German origin.
According to the German government, among the non-German nationalities among the suspects in 2023, people from Syria dominated with 24 cases, Poland with 17 and Turkey with 16. In 2022, these three nations were already in the top three places.” See here.
The number and brutality of knife attacks in Germany have continued to increase since your testimony, Mr. Restle, such as the events in Solingen, when a Syrian perpetrator killed three people and injured eight others on August 23, 2024, and in Aschaffenburg on January 22, 2025, when an Afghan attacked children at a daycare center in the park, killing a two-year-old child and a 41-year-old helping man, show.
Georg Restle has also attracted attention earlier with his partisan and non-objective reporting. On March 2, 2023, for example, Georg Restle broadcast a report on his program Monitor that began with the words of an angry demonstration participant recorded in a video:
“If we really want peace — seriously — then this is no longer about it, I am AFD, I am green and I am yellow… (Another in between: “Yes, that’s what it’s about…” ) … then it’s about peace, and nothing else!”
Pan to the moderator Georg Restle with the introductory words:
“The main thing is to be loud, whatever that has to do with peace.”
Mr. Restle certainly succeeded in emotionalizing the “sheep” with this manipulative technique: manipulation by generating emotions. Afterwards, the presenter greeted the audience.
Mr. Restle continues:
“She had called for it, and thousands followed her last Saturday in Berlin: Sahra Wagenknecht and her uprising for peace. There has been a lot of debate in the last few days, and hardly a talk show could do without Wagenknecht. But what do the people who gather behind Wagenknecht want, and is this really the rebirth of the German peace movement, as some claim…”
Editing and recording of archive footage of the peace movement from 1983, in which “hundreds of thousands” demonstrated against nuclear armament in Bonn’s Hofgarten. It is also interesting that, for example, at the “Querdenkerdemos” in Berlin in the summer of 2020, there was talk of “more than 5000 participants in Corona protests in Berlin”, for example in the Tagesspiegel — manipulation through selection and falsification of information. I don’t doubt that hundreds of thousands of people from the peace movement gathered in Bonn’s Hofgarten, just like the hundreds of thousands at the Querdenker demos in August 2020 according to the organizers, especially since I was there. Then pictures of the human chain in 1983 from Ulm to Stuttgart. So far okay.
Cut to the presenter:
“Yes, and I also took part in the demonstrations at the time, grew up with the peace movement, and that’s why I went to Berlin at the weekend, because I wanted to know what the people there understand by peace and pacifism, and what role Putin’s war crimes actually play in this…”
Cut to video “Peace demonstration in Berlin”: Comment by Restle:
“A demonstration for peace. The pictures seem strangely familiar, the symbols, the slogans, all the doves of peace — and yet I ask myself: What is meant by peace here? Is this really the beginning of a new peace movement, or what is it all about?”
Cut to Sahra Wagenknecht and her words on stage:
“On the one hand, it is about ending the terrible suffering and dying in Ukraine. It’s about making Russia an offer to negotiate instead of arming an endless war of attrition with more and more weapons.”
Restle then talks about the atrocities of Bucha — in order to put Wagenknecht’s statements in a bad light — and unequivocally relates them to Russia, although the perpetrators of this despicable massacre have not been clarified in any way. Later the statement:
“None of that matters here in Berlin, instead Russian flags, Russian war propaganda, I don’t see a single Ukrainian flag here …” (Author’s note: there was actually none to be seen on the video, but there was nothing to hear or see of Russian war propaganda either).
„… Some even openly show their support for the Russian war of aggression. Putin’s friends wear orange and black, like the so-called Night Wolves, Russian ultranationalists, they are also on the move here.” (Panning to a black and orange bow on the waistband of a demonstrator: in my eyes a cheap, but probably effective attempt at manipulation to give the audience a picture of the apparent composition of the 50,000 demonstrators (according to the organizer).
Of course, mainly right-wing extremists at an event by Sahra Wagenknecht!
Mr. Restle understands the “art” of manipulation. Through a clever sequence of texts and images, through images and statements torn from the overall context, through fragmentation of information, through the scattering of half-truths, through the arousing of emotions and through other manipulative techniques, he twists the viewer’s evaluation framework.
If you want to know more about this show by Monitor on ARD and my assessment of it, here is the link to my article:
Result
Most mass media — aka propaganda organs of the rulers and elites — do not provide reliable information. These media and their employees should slowly reflect on saving their residual credibility, which has shrunk to a minimum, through honest and objective reporting.
In other countries, a change in media and reporting is noticeable.
At the end of January 2025, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced a revolution in dealing with the media, saying that US President Donald Trump would talk to all media and personalities in the future, and not just to the traditional media “sitting here in the room”. She continued:
“According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ trust in the mainstream media has fallen to a record low. Millions of people, especially young people, have turned away from traditional TV channels and newspapers and consume their news from podcasts, blogs, social media and other independent media.”
It is important “for our team to share President Trump’s message and adapt the White House to the new media landscape in 2025!”
In Austria , the FPÖ caused uproar and horror at the ÖRR
According to the newspaper Krone, the FPÖ plans to oblige the ORF to save 15 percent of its budget. This corresponds to a cost saving of about 150 million euros and could affect a third of the staff. As a center-leftist, I am never happy about the reduction in personnel. However, this kind of left-green, anti-democratic, one-sided opinion journalism, as it has prevailed in Germany and Austria in recent years among the public broadcasters, requires a fundamental change. Those journalists who followed their conscience no longer work for the broadcasters — they have been “sorted out” — and those who remain either have no backbone, are ideologically blinded, or simply do not carry out their mission of objective and neutral reporting. I can imagine that one or the other journalist or editor at the public broadcasters will have problems having to look at their portrait in the mirror in the morning.
ORF foundation board member Heinz Lederer warned that in addition to staff cuts, productions such as “Tatort” or folk music as well as cooperations could also be affected. The Greens criticized the plans as dangerous in terms of media policy, as they would make ORF massively dependent on politics and weaken editorially.
With the Greens, I always have to smile about their ideological blindness: At what point in time were the public broadcasters more dependent on politics since 1945 than they are today? They have degenerated into pure propaganda organs of elitist politics, which no longer cares about pluralism of opinion. They help the megalomaniac elites and their political puppets in the pursuit of their nefarious goals.
In Germany, for example, the broad masses trust the traditional daily newspapers such as FAZ, SZ and the like, as well as the public broadcasters. The “Macht nach Acht”, for example, provides those who are in charge of thinking with the most important data so that they can look at the world again the next day “informed”. Whether people’s trust in these media is justified, however, is another matter. Opinions among the population differ widely in this regard. Some claimed, especially in Corona times — rightly in my opinion — that these stations manipulated, glossed over, censored and trivialized, and spoke of lying press, rip-off institutions, cultural dictatorship, reprimanding and reprimanding, opinion corridor, conspiracy of official-like journalistic existences, conformist attitude collectives and the like.
The public broadcasters have told the politicians what they want and stamped other opinions into the ground in a way that can be described as disgusting.
The AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany and the FPÖ in Austria in particular recognized the corona hoax from the beginning and were discriminated against, discredited and labeled for it by politicians of the party cartels and their dependent media. And the Austrian Greens, who were part of the Corona conspiracy against humanity, are talking about the planned reforms making ORF massively dependent on politics and weakening it editorially? Let the melons roll from your green eyes and finally recognize reality. It’s never too late for that, not even for diehards like you.
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At the end of September 2024, my book “Dangerous Zeros – Warmongers and Elite Representatives” was published.
Translated and edited by L. Earth