Enhanced Photojournalism

[Penguin]

*sigh*
some explainations for the non-Krauts:

It is neither required for a journalist in Germany to have a certain party book, nor to have a certain ideology. This also goes for teachers (wtf do they have to do with photojournalism?)
Same as it's free for any leftie to start a banking career, it's free for any conservative to become a journalist. I would really like to read the study which says that 3/4 of all journalists in Germany are supporters of the Green Party.

That being said: objective photojournalism is a lie. In the moment someone enters a scene with a camera, the scene is different, manipulated, you always have another person in it, behind the cam. People often act differently when they know they are being recorded.
Picture manipulation/altering is as old a photography, often used for dramatic effect or enhancement, especially in social or war reports.

I'm also worried about the quality of journalism, but as in any trade, personal thoughts should not win over professionalism. That's why I don't see niche media as better or worse, it is always the quality of research which counts. "Sources" who just quote each other or just report some little bites without the context of the original source are sadly common, the size of the publication does not matter. Though I have often seen small blogs, especially from the loony fraction, just quoting each other. Just follow them, till you find the original mainstream media source (which often is about something totally different)

I linked to a great statement by an ex-reporter who he even calls himself a socialist () about the future of journalism and its quality some days ago in another thread. Here is the link again: http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/journ...imon_testi0719

A little about media bias in Germany - these are the biggest national daily newspapers in Germany, in numbers of copies in 2011: (for the amount of readers, multiply the numbers by about 3-4)

1. Bild 2.7 million (conservative) analogy for the Brits: The Sun
2. Süddeutsche Zeitung 418000 (center/left)
3. Frankfurter Allgemeine 360000 (conservative) British: The Times
4. Die Welt 252000 (conservative) British: Daily Telegraph
5. Handelsblatt 136000 (business/economics paper - not green )
6. Frankfurter Rundschau 119000 (left-liberal) British: The Guardian
7. Financial Times Deutschland 100000 (business/economics paper - also not green) British: guess what?
8. Die Tageszeitung (taz) 53000 (left/green )
9. Neues Deutschland 36000 (authoritan-socialist) - ex gdr pravda

I tried to be neutral in judging the political tendency, though of course left/right is always a matter from where you look - however I don't see a terrible PC/left/green bias here...

(Source: http://www.print.de/Top-10/Top-10-Pr....-Quartal-2011)

Note that we also have many regional papers here which also sell a considerable amount of copies, many of them more than the national papers, but I'm to lazy to write about them too, you can have a look at their numbers here

Btw: here is the original article which includes some picture examples: http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-898509.html