German public broadcaster ARD has been blasted after admitting it “boosted” the sound of booing at the speech given by U.S. President Donald Trump late last week.
President Trump gave his speech at Davos on Thursday, again delivering sharp criticism to the mainstream media. He stated: “it wasn’t until I became a politician that I realized how nasty, how mean, how vicious, and how fake the press can be.”
ARD released a clip of the speech on the Twitter account for its popular news programme “Tagesschau” in which distinct boos could be heard directly after the President’s comments. A short time later the programme admitted it had booted the volume of the audio in order to showcase the booing. The show has since been accused of “manipulation”, Stern reports.
Those behind the programme wrote on Twitter, “We did actually make the sound a little louder at the end so that you can hear the booing. Only in this way can we reflect what our correspondents have reported.”
Editor-in-chief of the German tabloid newspaper Bild Julian Reichelt called out those involved saying it was, “hard to imagine that you would have done the same for applause.”
Kai Gniffke, the editor in chief of ARD defended the move saying that it proved the reporting of his journalists.
“By the way, newspapers also make comparisons when they enlarge image sections and may even mark them with a red circle – nobody would come up with the idea of calling this manipulation, but rather journalistic precision,” he said.
The move is not the first time the German media has shown a bias against the U.S. President.
German left-leaning magazine Der Spiegel has been slammed by many for its various magazine covers including one that depicted President Trump cutting off the head of the Statue of Liberty designed to be reminiscent of Islamic State executions.
Some in the German press have also engaged in radical rhetoric regarding Trump and his presidency with Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of left-wing paper Die Zeit, saying last year on a political panel television programme that the only way to end the “Trump catastrophe” was a “murder in the White House.”
In a more bizarre comment, editor in chief of the centre-right paper Die Welt Ulf Poschardt said that the best way for Germans to oppose Trump was to be more multicultural and more “gay.”
Germany’s establishment media collectively lost their minds when Breitbart London reported on a cathedral being set on fire in January last year, in addition to the use of an illustrative jetski photo which happened to include a barely recognisable, famous semi-retired footballer.