Since it’s criminal, bribery has to be conducted with some measure of subtlety and the author explains the sneaky ways in which bribes are handed over.
Looking back at all of this, however, the paid, all-inclusive trips that were also subsidized by our taxpayers were just the tip of the iceberg. What was truly corrupt and absolutely unforgivable were the gifts. A good example is the annual meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait).
It is held in a strictly Islamic country, right before Christmas when the news cycle is always slow. Here, Western journalists weren't attending in droves because they wanted to escape their fattening Christmas roast and all that alcohol.
Every participant who stuck around until the end of that terribly boring, multi-day meeting and filed their reports from the conference's press center (which was always more of a propaganda center) like a good little boy, was rewarded with valuable gifts at the end: one year a golden Rolex, the next year a golden fountain pen, another year a set of valuable coins – always something that would please everyone.
The gifts (each year was different, but all journalists attending an annual meeting received the same thing) were either placed discreetly in the hotel room or you could pick them up in the "press center" on the final day of the conference.
Everybody knew it. Nobody turned it down. In any case, I never saw any fellow journalists leaving their gifts behind. We were all infinitely corrupt. So, the next time you see, hear or read a report about the annual meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, you can rest assured that it's basically a bought PR report.
Moreover, our mainstream media are even thankful and report on it eagerly, because it usually takes place during a lull in the annual news cycle and they get to fill up a few pages free of charge. Something else to keep in mind: The propaganda..., excuse me, press centers in Arabian countries always have a 24-hour buffet. Therefore, the journalists don't spend anything on food. What's more, for every day they're in Saudi Arabia, a journalist can deduct an additional 48 euros from their income tax. Every day in the Emirates and Kuwait it's 42 euros, in Oman it’s 48 euros, and it's 56 euros a day in Qatar. And what do the German-speaking viewers, readers or listeners in the get as a thank you for their generosity? A fat load of paid reporting.
This is pure contempt. They're making a mockery of the public.
Well-Greased: The Sleazy System of Journalism Prizes
As if everything I just mentioned wasn’t already enough, journalists also receive additional rewards for their reporting - and these come in the form “journalism prizes." Explaining this raffish system is best done by comparing it with certain distinctions that are awarded to various foods.
Every country in the world probably has similar organizations, but in Germany you will see gold, silver and bronze DLG Quality Seals on thousands of foods. Make of it what you will, you should at least know what's going on behind the scenes.
Every year, around 27,000 products are "tested" by the Association of German Agriculture, a food industry organization, for their appearance, smell and taste. Chemical or microbiological tests are only carried out in exceptional cases. Afterward, every product that doesn't show a "deviation from the expected quality" receives the best classification – that is, a gold quality seal.
The testing procedure also doesn't say much about a product's ingredients and its actual quality. Consumers can see what a DLG quality seal is worth every time the media publicizes another scandal involving a DLG endorsed food.
Like the recent hygiene scandal at the industrial Müller- Brot bakery, where mouse droppings and insects were found in Müller-Brot ingredients and baking machinery. DLG seal is definitely one of the more dubious distinctions found in the German-speaking world. This is because they also award their quality seal to foods that use additives and artificial flavors to enhance their taste. These include, for example, the strawberry cream yogurt from Zott. This yogurt's rosy color doesn't come from its strawberries alone, but through the addition of red beet food coloring.
Consumer protection advocate Silke Schwartau finds this unbelievable, "How can it be that an artificially flavored product is still awarded a distinction for great taste?" Yet additives and artificial flavors have never seemed to concern the DLG's taste testers. Even the Haribo gummy bears that contain additives (such as carnauba wax, aka E903) sport the DLG's official seal.
Another example: the "Meister Krüstchen" bake-at-home rolls from "Harry" are distinguished with the DLG's golden seal. In the Stiftung Warentest, (Germany's most reputable organization providing consumer product comparisons), the same rolls received an "unsatisfactory" (lowest) rating. Stiftung Warentest's explanation: The rolls tasted "old, bland, only slightly aromatic..."
The DLG couldn't explain the serious differences between these test results. Still, all of this is easy to understand if you know how the system works. The DLG is an organization made up of lobbyists from the agriculture and food industries. It is definitely not a consumer protection organization. The association has more than 20,000 members and it finances itself through the revenues it generates with its services.
Needless to say, this includes awarding their DLG quality seal on a massive scale. Nearly all of the products they "test" – up to over 90 percent – receive one of these "quality seals." Although, to feature it on your product, you need to pay a licensing fee. So, when it comes to "journalism prizes," we'll be talking about a rather undignified system that basically functions in the same way.
Do you think that newspaper readers, radio listeners or television viewers – that is, neutral consumers – are the ones who decide which journalists will get which prizes? Nope, the system simply hands out awards to itself, just like in our example of the DLG quality seal. The committees that decide who's going to get a journalism prize are almost exclusively made up of journalists from media companies who then "reward" other journalists. They don't care about being nonpartisan, independent or truthful - just like with the DLG seal, they only care about mediocre quality and anything that promotes sales. Just like foods full of artificial additives get a golden seal slapped on their packaging, journalists who deliver mediocre quality, toe the politically correct line and kowtow to the elite get these (supposedly) prestigious media prizes as a "thank you."
In many cases, this system practices the same style of consumer deception, it just uses journalists as its product. If you dig deeper, you'll find that media companies – like newspapers – love to feature their award-winning journalists to sell more copies, but they are often the ones who financed and presented the awards in the first place.
Of course, the journalists who rack up these honors keep their mouths shut. After all, they're not going to turn down the "prize money." These accolades are often accompanied by thousands of euros. I've been to a lot of these award ceremonies. Whenever organizations close to a political party presented awards to media journalists, and I mean organizations so close that any rookie investigative journalist could find out in minutes that they were owned by that same party through a network of other companies, then the consumer deception was pretty obvious - but we played along with the system. We were corrupt. Just look at how many companies finance journalism awards these days. Do you think that any of these companies want to give their support to any reporting that is critical of themselves and their products? It is a well-greased system – and yet some consumers out there still believe in a system of "independent" journalism.
The truth: When German-American think tanks and foundations present awards for allegedly excellent journalism, they are merely distinguishing the journalists who propagated their organization's point of view in a particularly positive manner to the people out there who don't know any better. So, we're back where we started, the proximity of our alpha journalists to the elites.
These alpha journalists, and we’ll get to know many of them in this book, are eager to accept these awards and their self-satisfaction is unmistakable. I know it all too well. After all, I used to be involved in the decision-making process for award ceremonies like these and I'm speaking here about something that was never meant to be revealed to the general public.
A typical example for the debasement of journalism prizes is the Hanns Joachim Friedrich Award, once a highly prestigious distinction for journalists. Now it is an award given to propagandists.