That growing stain of censorship and bias at Deutsche Welle
On May 25, 2019 German state-run broadcaster Deutsche Welle published an article titled "Narendra Modi's victory worries Indian Muslims", there DW quoted Asaduddin Owaisi, president of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen or AIMIM (All India Council of the Union of Muslims) a regional political party based in the Indian state of Telangana.
There are two interesting aspects about this article, that help give us a better idea of the ideology behind DW's activism disguised of journalism. A left-wing bias that comes through lazy journalism, that is, lack of further investigation, and omission, and finally, as an extreme but not as the last resort, use of censorship.
Who is Asaduddin Owaisi, the source quoted by DW?
Owaisi is the president of the Hyderabad-based AIMIM party and he is considered a rather controversial political figure, known for his anti-Semitic stance and criminal record, involving the excitement of violence in minority groups of Muslims and Dalits. In his political career he has been involved in several criminal acts due to his politics in minority groups of Muslims and Dalits. Among the accusations against Owaisi, the including manhandling the Medak district collector, criminal intimidation, rioting and promoting enmity between religious groups, chasing and beating up Syed Saleemuddin, a polling agent of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in the Moghalpura area, hate speech against Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking the Muslim community's support to his party, assault by a mob that he allegedly lead. [1]
"Every child is born a Muslim. His parents and society convert him to other religions. Islam is the real home of all religions. There is no forced conversion in Islam. It is you who need to come home, but we can't give you money for that."
Asaduddin Owaisi (January, 2016)[2]
Indian journalist, Vijeta Uniyal called out DW for quoting Owaisi without checking their sources, and the reply received from the German broadcaster was rather eloquent: Uniyal got blocked.
Uniyal started to speak out about the censorship and bias from DW, and told The Jerusalem Post: “As an Indian journalist living in Germany, I regularly analyze German media coverage. I have repeatedly tweeted about the anti-Israel bias in Deutsche Welle’s coverage. Last month, I was appalled to see an Indian politician with a track record of making antisemitic remarks being quoted by the broadcaster as a representative of the Indian Muslims.”
As the news was spreading and gaining attention through social networks, DW apologized, with an explanation that leaves much to be desired:
Nobody can believe that Uniyal was "blocked by accident". The option to block users is located at the upper right corner of the tweet, and the option to reply a tweet is located at the bottom left corner of a tweet. However, the "mistake" is a two-step action, because once you want to block another account, first you need to click the option to block the account, and then you need to confirm that you want to proceed with that.
The fact that DW quoted Owaisi without further scrutiny marks a significant difference to the treatment given to conservative voices or just anyone who may not stick to globalist narrative. We can think of how Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini or any member of Alternative for Germany (AfD), among others, get all sort of pejorative labels from DW.
Recently, this became more evident when the DW didn't hesitate to show discomfort with journalists who didn't follow, in this case, an anti-Israel bias. As a matter of fact, they tried to discredit journalist Antje Schippmann from Bild for her critical article about Iran. On the article titled "German tapped to head Iran trade vehicle pulls out after Israel comments" The ill-thought strategy of the ad hominem attack by stressing out the work history of the journalist and thus casting doubt of her reporting became more evident when the article was edited and the controversial passages removed, without any update note, something that was pointed out by Uniyal as well.
The original article from DW with the deleted passages can be found on Sindonews, among other sources: https://en.sindonews.com/dw/news/german-tapped-to-head-iran-trade-vehicle-pulls-out-after-israel-comments
That kind of "journalism" is not new. In several occasions users who commented on the English version of DW reported secret editing and deletion of entire passages which were controversial.
Censorship, rather common at Deutsche Welle
Censorship has been common currency with DW. On January, 2016, right after the Cologne New Year's Eve incidents where more than 2,000 refugees sexually assaulted women around the city's cathedral, a professor of migration was interviewed, but as soon as he mentioned that there might be something in the culture of these migrants that explains their abusive attitude towards women, the interview suddenly ran out of time. The abrupt, unedited cut was notorious, and the interview was not included in the reruns of the program.
Since 2015 during the peak of the refugee crisis in Europe, Deutsche Welle removed hundreds of comments criticizing Germany's migration policies and the government. Tens of users were banned in repeated occasions, and in most of the cases the banning was ideological.
In 2017, Deutsche Welle shut down the comments section of its English version, arguing that they were forced to take action against the proliferation of hate-speech. In reality, users were criticizing Deutsche Welle's biased reporting and consistent lies in alignment with the German government.
At this point, one of the commentators created a channel to keep the debate open, but by March, 2017 Deutsche Welle requested the comment blog platform Disqus to remove the channel "Dumme Welle Uncensored" under a copyright violation claim, for which evidence was never shown.
Sources:
- "Indian reporter accuses German new of citing antisemitic politician" - The Jerusalem Post (June 23, 2019)
- "Deutsche Welle: Wie ein Staatssender die Kritik ausschaltet" - Die Achse des Guten (June 20, 2019)
1. Controversies of Asaduddin Owais (Wikipedia)
2. "Every child is born a Muslim: Asaduddin Owaisi" - The Economic Times, January 6, 2015
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