We continue to share the words of a probably martyred journalist named Udo Ulfkotte.
FAZ Façade:
FAZ
A Corrupt Mind Lurks Behind
Bribed reporting at such an ostensibly serious newspaper like the FAZ? You can't believe it? FAZ journalist Werner Sturbeck, one of the FAZ correspondents in Düsseldorf, let himself be bribed by Thyssen-Krupp in 2012.
At least that is my interpretation of the ruling handed down by the District Court in Cologne (case no.: 28 0 19/97). Not a word about this verdict can be found in his official resume at the FAZ. On August 3, 2012, Sturbeck wrote the courtesy article "The Other Side of Thyssen-Krupp" in the business section of the FAZ.
With it, the FAZ was prostituting itself for the Thyssen-Krupp corporation. In July, 2012, before the courtesy article appeared, Werner Sturbeck took the Thyssen-Krupp corporate jet to Munich and then flew first class with Lufthansa for a five-day trip to Beijing. He spent his nights in the five-star hotels, "China World" in Beijing, "Ritz- Carlton Pudong" in Shanghai and "Sofitel" in Nanjing – without having to pay a cent. Thyssen-Krupp financed everything.
In return for this, they expected favorable reporting. The FAZ saved around 15,000 euros on travel costs alone. Nothing about this was included in the article that Werner Sturbeck wrote after his trip, even though the German Press Council's code requires it for invitation trips like this.
Boundaries were clearly crossed at the FAZ, just as so often has been the case. All's well as long as the paying readers don't notice. I list other unpleasant facts in the section "Favoring Favors: How to Make the Media Compliant." Looking back at Sturbeck's luxury trip, the FAZ admits to their guilt by saying, "The first class trips with Thyssen-Krupp are not normal and not okay."
Not normal? I was laughing pretty hard when I heard that. Now, let's take a closer look at one of the sponsors of typical luxury trips like these. One that the FAZ, of course, always reported on favorably throughout the past. In retrospect, I'm no longer quite sure how many luxury trips were financed for FAZ journalists by one of the richest men in the world, the fairytale Sultan, Qabus of Oman.
Qabus of Oman
The man is a billionaire – and a classic dictator. CBS News in America is not the only outlet that refers to the ruler of Oman as a dictator. The London Guardian calls him an "autocrat," the daily newspaper Die Welt calls him the "most likeable dictator" in the world.
He is one of the few dictators the USA officially supports. Nevertheless, he is a dictator and remains a dictator. Is it best practice for a respectable newspaper to be accepting invitations from dictators? Regardless, the senior executives at the FAZ had no qualms about repeatedly accepting luxurious invitations from this dictator, sending their employees to visit Oman on several occasions.
I will describe this in detail. When an all-expenses paid invitation arrived from this dictator's little empire, the FAZ was always eager to accept – and not just from this dictator, but they never shared this part of the story with their readers.
Firstly, if they did, the average reader would get a completely wrong impression. A reader would think: Okay, someone is paying for a reporter's trip. However, in light of the aforementioned country of Oman, which we will use as a representative example, this would be an extreme understatement. The reality: With these invitations from Oman, we travelled like FAZ VIPS, flying first class or business, at the head of state's expense. The Sultan's personnel were waiting at the airport to quickly and very discretely whisk their guest - a simple journalist – past the "ordinary mortals" and through security.
At this point, at the very latest, you don’t feel like a simple journalist anymore, but more like a true VIP and somehow extremely important. Here, I should also mention that this special treatment isn't particular to the exotic Sultanate of Oman, it is something that journalists experience quite often – especially journalists from the "mainstream media."
Back to Oman: In front of the airport, an air-conditioned, luxury limousine with chauffeur and interpreter were waiting for me and would accompany me for the rest of the trip. The interpreter was also a kind of talking wallet and would practically ensure that I never paid for anything myself, anywhere on my trip.
They were skilled at anticipating a guest's every wish, simply from the look in your eyes. At the end of the day, all of this was financed by the billionaire and dictator Sultan Qabus, who was 54 undergoing cancer treatment in Germany as I was writing this manuscript.
Once, during one of my trips for the FAZ, I was staying at the Omani 5 star luxury hotel, the Al Bustan Palace, in an expansive suite overlooking the Gulf of Oman. Of course, this was completely paid for by the government of Oman. There at the bar, I ran into the actor Diether Krebs (who passed away in 2000) and we started talking.
Krebs was amazed that a German journalist could afford such an expensive, luxury hotel. He complained to me about how incredibly expensive the internationally-recognized PADI diving courses taught by the Greek, Jason Erodottu, were at this hotel. His sons Moritz and Till were taking these courses.
I didn't tell him that all I had to do was book my dives to the room and the Sultan would pay for them. Yes, the Sultan even paid for my training to become a PADI-certified rescue diver with Jason Erodottu as my private diving instructor.
The Sultan paid for everything that was booked to the room. The dirty laundry that I had washed and pressed before I left for the airport, the post cards from the souvenir shop, the expensive phone calls to the office in Frankfurt, the evenings at fine dining establishments. According to my state escorts, this was the custom among the Sultan's guests in his country. I was naive and stupid to accept that, but then again, I was also corrupt.
That's how we were baited, only to be caught in the trap. Admitting to all of this now doesn't right any of my wrongs – but it could serve as a warning to others. All of this only had one purpose: As long as you get into that air-conditioned limousine with its chauffeur and interpreter and indulge in that super-rich lifestyle, letting them drive you around and cover all your expenses, you are constantly under their control.
The security services in the country (and the Omani dictatorship has a very extensive security network) and the Minister of Information, who was also the acting intelligence director, were constantly informed of every step their guest journalists took. They also controlled the people you talked to and the impressions you got from the country. They knew who you talked to on the phone. Naturally, you never had a conversation with any unhappy citizens, let alone any "dissidents" on trips like these. How could you? You were constantly surrounded by the intelligence director's "guides," who any normal citizen in that country would immediately recognize as secret service agents.
If you opened a local newspaper, it would only be full of praise for the Sultan. The media, of course, were also owned by the Sultan. Noble court reporting. At the German embassy, it wasn't any different either. After all, the diplomats didn't want to risk a word of criticism appearing in the FAZ. Who wants to get thrown out of a country where you live like you're in paradise, when all you have to do is keep your eyes shut tightly enough?
Of course, you couldn't fail to notice how Omanis got preferential treatment, getting served first in stores. Foreigners, and not just foreign workers from the Indian subcontinent, were obviously seen as second-class human beings in Oman. Of course, there were also human rights violations happening under this dictatorship that I and many other journalists "sugarcoated" in our articles.
5-star, air-conditioned, luxury limousine, 5-star suite, blue skies, sandy beaches and an atmosphere of being on vacation: That was the sugarcoated reality as I perceived it. It was better to just ignore everything else. That’s what everyone else from the German-speaking world was doing in those days, when they received their invitation to visit the Sultan and do PR for him.
Still, that doesn't make it any better. Imagine a young man from a poor family who had to work hard for everything he had, because his father had died early. Delivering newspapers, working on construction sites, standing in assembly lines – just to be able to go to college and improve his career prospects – and then he hits the jackpot. For free. Without any effort. Wait, without any effort? All he had to do was just ignore everything he didn't want to see.
All he had to do to win the big jackpot was write what the nobility wanted to hear. Naturally, after my first trip to Oman, I shared my experiences with my colleagues and not just at the FAZ. Needless to say, I had a lot of fellow journalists who also wanted to finally hit the jackpot too.
Klaus Bering
I will never forget my friend Klaus Bering, a diplomatic correspondent for the dpa news agency at the time. Receiving an invitation through the dpa, he also enjoyed the seductive, 5-star treatment in Oman. On our flight back to Germany from Muscat, the capital of Oman, this respected journalist drank so much in the business class that he unabashedly threw up in front of the other passengers several times.
Even after the fact, Bering thought it was perfectly natural that the stewardesses would clean the vomit off him like he was a little sheik – after all, the Sultan was paying for everything. I can also say that one of Germany's former foreign ministers, Klaus Kinkel, probably has a memory of this dpa correspondent that he would rather forget.
Klaus Kinkel
One time, when I was flying with Kinkel and Bering in a tiny air force jet for a short visit to the Near East, Bering, a chain-smoker, constantly kept lighting up one cigarette after another, even though Kinkel kept asking him politely, yet firmly, to show some consideration for the non-smokers in the airplane.
Kinkel probably still remembers this to this day, because the air in that little plane was simply unbearable. Some journalists really don't know where to draw the line when they're travelling at somebody else’s expense. As I recall, one of these beneficiaries, who reported compliantly and, from my personal point of view, not neutrally after being invited on trips to Oman was Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Don't get me wrong, there were many others as well, particularly outside of the FAZ, who suddenly wanted to travel to Oman in those days. To clarify: I don't know if and I'm also not claiming that my former FAZ colleague Frankenberger accepted gifts in Oman.
However, we often talked about these kinds of things and he also received the same 5-star luxury treatment as a guest of the Sultan, which I experienced many times in Oman. Similarly to how I felt about it at the time, Frankenberger didn't think it was inappropriate and didn't feel like he had been "corrupted" when we spoke about this in the office.
During these luxurious trips, we were like kids in a candy store who didn't know which glass we should reach into first. Of course, we took advantage of it. After all, it was a job and we didn't ask questions.
In sports, you never hear a top scorer say: I want less, because I don't think it's fair that I'm earning more than a defender. At the FAZ in those days, we were living in a microcosm which, in my view, had lost its bearings and taken on a corrupt set of values. What was right? What was wrong? Yet in retrospect, we were defining a set of values for other people through our articles that was crazy. Today, after the revelations about him, Frankenberger has become rather controversial, but he is still in charge of the foreign affairs desk at the FAZ. We both started at the FAZ at around the same time in 1986.