I’m posting excerpts of the book below in order to vindicate a life cut short - that of author Udo Ulfkotte and to help the public see where they should NOT PLACE THEIR TRUST.

The former FAZ Washington correspondent Matthias Rüb wrote the adulation to US President Bush cited above shortly before the Iraq War began in 2003, in violation of international law.

One year later he received the Arthur F. Burns Award for a different article. The Arthur F. Burns Award is presented by Germany's Foreign Minister. So, who selects the winners today? The jury includes, for example, the journalists Sabine Christiansen and Stefan Kornelius (Süddeutsche Zeitung).

Keep these names in the mind. We will come across them and their interesting connections quite often. In Germany, economic correspondents from respected daily newspapers also write for corporate magazines under pseudonyms, so they can report on the newspapers where they're employed.

Editors at state-owned, public broadcasting companies also take money from political parties to instruct politicians on how they can keep their distance from rabid journalists. All of that is taken for granted these days.

Business reporters give us the financial reports about banks on TV, finish recording and then go play the host at bank-sponsored events, receiving princely sums for their services.

Germany is at the same time both the Bought and the Sold Republic. At any rate, we're being drenched in bought truths around the clock – especially when it comes to politics and the economy. As a journalist, in certain networks you can learn how to create or strengthen the public's opinions. It's all about courtesy reporting in the best interest of politicians, parties, associations or institutions. I witnessed it over decades and actively participated in it – as a vain employee at the FAZ.

I will describe it to the best of my ability. It gets really scary when politicians, the lords of privileged information, dictate the use or non-use of news to journalists. A nice way of saying this is calling it "authorizing." A politician is allowed to give their blessing to what they said and even to what they were asked.

Anything undesirable is redacted. As the SpiegelBlog wrote about it in 2012: As a German journalist, when you are interviewing an American and you give them the option of reviewing their own statements at the end, they will sometimes look at you like an extra-terrestrial in jihadist's clothing. Isn't that incredibly stupid? Giving the interviewee so much power?

In Germany, authorization has been nurtured for decades. Although DER SPIEGEL didn't invent it in the 1950s, (...) they have cultivated it so ardently, it has become the industry standard in this country, at least for 18 interviews. When you think about it, all authorizing means is that the interviewer is bowing down to an authority. Journalists are therefore simply submitting to the powerful.

Politicians can make any unpleasant news disappear by claiming that it was an “unauthorized" interview." In this way, the lords of privileged information dictate journalists' use or non-use of information in Germany – and we think it is completely “normal – just like people in the Middle Ages thought the reports coming out of the nobility's courts were "normal."

Today, just like in the Middle Ages, a few court minions get to sit very close to the powerful and feast on their words. The staging, the costumes of this drama may have changed over the centuries, but it's still being directed by the same entity: the network of the powerful.

Leading journalists are surrounded by the networks of the elites, from which, normal citizens are simply excluded. Journalists like to claim that they fulfill an important function of criticism and control. Allegedly, they want to track down and reveal persistent abuses. Above all, they want to "keep tabs on the powerful." That is why journalists like to refer to themselves as “the Fourth Estate."

The function of providing information is the media's and journalists' central function. This means providing their audience with information on things they didn't know about before – and doing so in a comprehensive, objective and understandable way.

They should also be doing this in a way that doesn't remind us of the way journalism is practiced in a dictatorship.

What should we think when the ZDF anchorman Claus Kleber compares his own program, Germany's state-sponsored public news program, the Tagesschau, with North Korean government television?

Furthermore, how can it be tolerated that somebody like Kai Diekmann, the editor-in-chief of the "independent" Bild newspaper, is a member of the controversial Atlantik-Brücke organization?

Are you still really neutral if you, as the publisher of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, like Josef Joffe, are also sitting on the board of the pro-American and "CIA-related think tank" the Aspen Institute? Josef Joffe even said the following about his lobbying work for the USA in Germany "Since the majority of the people in our country do not think very highly of the USA, I like to write against this majority."

Doesn't Josef Joffe, a litigious party pooper, know that the Aspen Institute's office in Berlin is suspected of having also been the office that US intelligence agency officers were working out of? This is the conclusion of a study on the transatlantic relations of Shepard Stone, the first director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin: One is only extremely reluctant to disturb this "picturesque still life" with the suspicion that Stone was a case officer for one or even several American intelligence agencies.

His "office": the Berlin Aspen Institute. Can you – like the very likeable and liberal-minded journalist Stefan Kornelius from the Süddeutsche Zeitung – be connected to a bunch of political lobbying organizations and then still report independently on political processes? I would say: No, you certainly can't.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung even wrote that themselves. When the ZDF correspondent Udo van Kämpen, who went to music school to study the drums, played a song at a press conference in the summer of 2014 for Angela Merkel's birthday, the Munich-based paper (SZ) was outraged: "Journalists don't do that. They are observers, not participants. (..) If you get too close to a politician, you should not report on them or their policies, otherwise your trustworthiness and independence go overboard (…) Journalists don’t have the best reputation as it is. So if the SZ also agrees that journalists aren’t allowed to get that close to politicians or their organizations, then how do these words fit in with the longstanding connections of the SZ journalist Stefan Kornelius? In the meantime, the SZ columnist Stefan Kornelius has hit rock bottom.

That same USA that he energetically defended against all attacks in his articles throughout the years still went and stabbed the Germans in the back by spying on our citizens here.

That apparently also led Kornelius to adopt a new posture towards the USA. Here is what one newspaper wrote about Kornelius' new, apparently reformed attitude: Kornelius' last commentaries awaken the impression of an insulted writer-for-hire who realized he might have been backing the wrong horse. With growing foreign policy tensions between Germany and the USA, it may not only mean fewer cocktail receptions and award ceremonies on the other side of the Atlantic. They will also be appreciated less among the German elite.

Everybody bets on the wrong horse once in a while. That doesn't interfere with their independence, does it? But how can the editor-in-chief of the popular weekly business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Roland Tichy, simultaneously be the chairman of the board of the CDU-connected Ludwig Erhard Foundation, member on the advisory board of the Johanna Quandt Foundation" (founded by the billionaire Johanna Quandt) and also on the advisory board of the radical Friedrich August von Hayek Foundation?

Holger Steltzner, the publisher responsible for the prestigious business section of the once so renowned FAZ, is also a member of the radical Friedrich August von Hayek Foundation's advisory board. He does not mention this in his official FAZ biography."

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992), despised democracy as "a system produced through the blackmail and corruption system of politics," as a "word fetish.”

Cicero writes about Hayek: "Hayek's dogmas also include that democratic decisions may only be made by those who are affected by them. This means: Only the rich should be able to decide how much in taxes the rich pay to the state, i.e. the general public. This is also one way to eliminate democracy.

Is this something that a leading German journalist can support? Whose lobbying work are they doing? Is that what independent journalism looks like? Are you able to report freely if you support that?

Even more shocking: Transatlantic organizations based in Germany were able to apply for US grants if they used this money for influencing Germans to support pro-American interests, such as the free trade agreements promoted by the USA.

You think that's just a crazy conspiracy theory? Then you can't believe what the renowned Washington Post and the US embassy say anymore, because they both reported on it in 2014.

Every well-prepared manipulation of leading German opinion makers in Germany would earn you between $5000 and $20,000 from the US embassy - depending on the importance of the elites influenced.

While I was writing this manuscript, the American embassy in Berlin had forms available online where US-related organizations in Germany could apply for money to carry out Washington's propaganda objectives in Germany. The US embassy in Berlin even expressly thanked the numerous participants in this manipulation project. Do the German alpha journalists, the ones that still boast or have boasted of their close, intimate contacts to such pro- American organizations in Germany, really want to claim they didn’t know anything about all this?

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