In journalism, as has become clear to me since I have been writing these critical essays on DER SPIEGEL’s coverage, there is a strange inability to celebrate. Intellectual autonomy and cleverness are ascribed to those who hit the hardest. Attacks engender praise. Don’t be too soft. Indeed, at media congresses over the last several months, people have been telling me to up the aggression, to go for the throat. DER SPIEGEL, they say, deserves it.

From my perspective, though, that is nothing more than pure ideology. Journalistic groupthink.

And yet, dear readers, I, too, have been infected. I am now suffering from a serious case of praise-phobia. Which has led me to spend the last several months doing little else then scouring all of DER SPIEGEL’s more extensive articles about the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on the search for mistakes. And yes, I did find a few points worthy of criticism, which I will examine at length below – but which, in truth, have more to do with the media industry’s lack of dialogue and empathy as a whole.

But first, I must express great praise of DER SPIEGEL’s coverage of the AfD. Often, it is really good. Why? Here are three things I have discovered.

• First, there are a number of gripping exposés that demonstrate what makes this party, dedicated as it is to the fear of the future, so dangerous. It’s adoption of Russian and Chinese propaganda, the endless string of donation and financial scandals, the potential corruptibility of individual functionaries, the verifiable links within right-wing extremist groups like the Identitarians, the Reichsbürger and the neo-Nazis.

• Second, DER SPIEGEL exhibits a significant degree of linguistic sensitivity. Nobody at the magazine brands all AfD supporters across the board as Nazis or fascists and it is cautious and exacting when it comes to applying labels, apparently having long-since realized that overused proclamations warning loudly and shrilly of the return of fascism are no longer particularly effective. DER SPIEGEL’s coverage has more the character of a meticulous examination with a historical depth of focus. There are numerous essays painstakingly striving for accuracy, exploring the question of how to understand this new authoritarianism and how it should be combated – and whether Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen or Björn Höcke should be called fascists and what the actual analytical benefits might be of doing so. In brief: A facile demonization of the AfD is nowhere to be found. Ann-Katrin Müller, who has been on the AfD beat for DER SPIEGEL since 2019 and is one of the best AfD reporters in the country, writes of "a party that exhibits right-wing extremist traits.” It is a clever formulation. And accurate.

• Third, DER SPIEGEL coverage provides a broad, comprehensive and also precise image of the AfD and the new power of right-wing populism, one that is almost overwhelmingly detailed. That is best illustrated by a single number, albeit one that highlights the danger of journalistic overkill: On the eve of the parliamentary elections in February, there were up to 80 articles per week on the website that had to do with the AfD in some way or another. In a normal, randomly chosen week (in November 2024, for example), there were around 12 pieces per week. And they cover all (really, all) aspects and issues: the party’s energy and transportation policy; the AfD’s muddled economic program that is seemingly aimed at destroying the country's prosperity; the AfD’s odd ideas about privatizing pension funds, leaving the EU, discarding the euro … and more. It is notable that DER SPIEGEL’s coverage of the AfD is heavily influenced by women. The investigative analyses by Melanie Amann (who was responsible for the party from 2013 to 2019), by Ann-Katrin Müller and by Deike Diening, Dialika Neufeld and many others deserve praise – for two reasons. First, because the hateful backlash and threats are significantly more aggressive when the reporter responsible for the story in question has – from the perspective of the right-wing extremist horde – the wrong gender. Steadfastly staying the course here is truly courageous. Second, many of their articles have a timeless relevance, even well after the events that occasioned their writing in the first place.

Just one example: In 2017, DER SPIEGEL reporter Dialika Neufeld, the daughter of German and Senegalese parents, traveled through the country, essentially as a unique kind of perception experiment. She interviewed people who, like her, have darker skin. She wanted to know: How are they looked at, shoved aside, insulted, attacked? How are their lives in areas where right-wing extremists receive a significant share of the vote, where jackbooted gangs are part of the cityscape? How differently must the rustling of twigs sound when you’re jogging alone through the forest and somebody suddenly appears? I can’t remember reading a DER SPIEGEL story that shook me up quite that much. Those wanting to understand in concrete terms what the normalization of racist thought and AfD propaganda in everyday life means for those who have long been declared foreigners for ideological reasons despite loving this country and calling it their home should read this story. It belongs in the country’s schoolbooks.

Again, DER SPIEGEL delivers comprehensively substantiated, multifaceted, concrete warnings from the deeply reactionary, intellectually entrenched AfD world. It is a world in which sweaty, hardworking men still chop their own wood and where there is, happily, no climate crisis. It is a world in which the Nazi era is "but a spot of bird shit” (Alexander Gauland) on German history and in which the party once campaigned for its own deportation and remigration program with gummy-candy airplanes for the kids and with candidates dressed up as pilots ready to carry out the deportations themselves. All of this is intelligently and comprehensively covered.

But in the background of this extremely successful informational work lurk dilemmas that are unfortunately not spelled out with the necessary clarity. And now, all those who have a weakness for negativity can let out a sigh of relief. This – after quite a fair amount of praise – is where my criticism begins. Because in DER SPIEGEL’s AfD coverage, there is a clearly perceptible awareness of the dilemmas that exist, but there are no tried and tested formats for debating those dilemmas – formats that could introduce, could provide a platform, for a more interactive, dialogue-based approach for those for whom all this coverage is produced. The readers. And that is a shortcoming. Because communication that is aware of existing dilemmas, as communication psychologist Friedemann Schulz von Thun has demonstrated, signals a different, pro-pluralism approachability. In times of instantaneous hostility, it opens up an awareness of new perspectives. Because suddenly, readers are confronted with competing viewpoints in addition to the costs and risks of their own position. Such thinking, guided by context and aware of contradictions, is by its very nature dialogical, as one struggles to find one’s own situationally appropriate point of view in full view of everyone without the prospect of landing on a perfect solution for eternity.

But enough theory. First, let’s look at the dilemmas and then I’ll make a couple of suggestions for improvement. I discovered four central dilemmas of DER SPIEGEL’s AfD coverage.

Dilemma Number One: Neutrality and partisanship

Efforts aimed at balance and neutrality are vitally important, but they can degenerate into lazy "he-said-she-said” journalism that continually hedges its bets in all directions and merely recites misanthropic AfD positions in an indifferent tone as though they were quasi-normal contributions to the societal debate. Yet the advocacy of indispensable values carries the danger of missionary activism – the threat of lectury moralizing journalism that can engender strong counterreactions. This dilemma can be illustrated with the question as to whether it is the job of journalists to fight for the continuation of liberal democracy.

In many stories and editorials (including some written by Editor-in-Chief Dirk Kurbjuweit) DER SPIEGEL has decided to do exactly that. I find that to be the correct decision and, in these dramatic times, also necessary. But the dilemma of neutrality and partisanship this creates is worth discussing, because there is an odd, undiscussed inconsistency at DER SPIEGEL and at many other media outlets in the country: It is acceptable for journalists to leverage their entire rhetorical weight in the defense of democracy, but they are not allowed to do the same on behalf of ecology or climate policy issues. Why not? Is the political reality more important than the ecological reality? Is there a concealed hierarchy of relevance among the great crises we are facing? Are free elections existentially more important than clean air? I would like to have a more precise understanding of these questions.

Dilemma Number Two: A new "false balance” problem

This dilemma has to do with the question as to when the tone used to report on democratic or definitively non-extremist parties should shift if the success of the populists begins to transform the entire political arena and two essentially antagonistic elements (journalists on one side, politics on the other) suddenly find themselves in the same corner, united by their authentic concerns for the future of democracy. I am not suggesting, of course, that journalists should start treating Germany’s established political parties, deeply rooted in democracy as they are, with deference and affirmation just because they share fundamental convictions about democracy. But the "false balance” problem appears here in a slightly altered form: How can a situation be prevented in which fundamentally unequal actors – right-wing extremists versus democratically rooted politicians – are analyzed with the same pejorative tone, which is at least formally similar to the populist narrative of impending doom and their attacks on established parties? And how can one, at the same time, maintain the necessary distance, avoiding the danger of overwrought, feel-good reporting that never takes off the kid gloves? Public consideration of such questions and dilemmas is essentially nonexistent in the pages of DER SPIEGEL – though it must immediately be noted that the magazine’s tone has softened over the years as it is. And that there are columns and portraits of politicians written by Susanne Beyer, who has consistently promoted a different tonality, a deeper, more self-reflective understanding – one free of a sympathetic embrace, but also with unnecessarily biting severity, a rather unique tightrope walk.

And finally, there is a cruelty inherent in the situation in which the media currently finds itself, characterized by its constant fight for political existence in combination with an unhealthy, permanent agitation magnified by sudden waves of arousal and the urge to react immediately – a situation about which the editorial team can do nothing. It is the collateral damage of a new media reality, not evil intention. Still, and again: All too often I see a lack – and this isn’t just true of DER SPIEGEL – of a balanced position of critical empathy, the tangible struggle for a sufficiently equitable description of politicians who, like all of us, are imperfect, sometimes melancholic and despondent, sometimes full of strength and energy, sometimes altruistic and sometimes egocentric, all of them contradictory.

Dilemma Number Three: We’ll call it the participation and representation dilemma

On the one hand, in the service of a sufficiently varied discourse, it is important to provide space for competing positions without prematurely rejecting them. Yet there is a danger here that such an approach will provide a veneer of acceptability to rather disgusting viewpoints. As such, it might make sense to justifiably ignore certain individual statements, or at least to cut them off from additional journalistic oxygen, even if doing so is increasingly performative given that the AfD has long since developed its own parallel mediaverse. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas refers to this approach as a necessary "de-thematization.” As a side note: Deliberately ignoring certain inhumane viewpoints is not censorship, dear Elon Musk fans, it is what’s known as civilization.

But what might this careful balancing act between attention and contempt look like? What decisions has DER SPIEGEL already taken? In contrast to other media outlets, DER SPIEGEL does not report on parliamentary queries made by the AfD in the Bundestag because the publication does not want to turn itself into a mouthpiece for right-wing propaganda. And since 2017, no word-for-word interviews with AfD politicians have appeared, because DER SPIEGEL’s principle of allowing interview partners to authorize their interviews before they are published creates its own unique set of problems. It opens the door to abuses of the journalistic form of the interview for the purposes of image and ideology cultivation by subsequently editing sentences into the text that were not actually said during the interview. Other magazines take a different approach. In mid-2023, for example, Stern published a much touted, endlessly long interview with senior AfD politician Alice Weidel that was both willfully critical yet diffusely humanizing – a piece in which one could read that she prefers picking up a good novel to watching a series on Netflix. Such a piece would never appear in the pages of DER SPIEGEL – correctly so, in my opinion. Beyond that, the magazine has made the decision to stand up for the preservation of the so-called firewall – the argument that Germany’s democratic parties should not cooperate with the AfD.

All of these fundamental decisions seem well-founded to me, but just like in other media outlets, they are not generally explained to the reading public or even put up for debate. And sometimes, the debate is merely simulated. One of the most dreadful pieces I have read in DER SPIEGEL about how the AfD should be approached is an essay that appeared in early March 2025 that wasn’t even written by a DER SPIEGEL journalist. Rather, it was a guest op-ed penned by Frauke Rostalski, a member of the German government’s Ethics Council. From the simple fact that many people in Germany vote for the AfD, she extrapolates "as a lawyer” a compulsion to warn against "firewalls of all kinds” – an argument that is flawed from the outset since good election results (the AfD received one in five votes in Germany’s federal elections in February) cannot be used as a justification for ethical and moral discourse demands, not even as a lawyer.

The article is a prime example of the conflation of factual and value judgments – a classic association fallacy. Moreover, the term firewall, as discussed earlier, refers to keeping the AfD out of government and ensuring that centrist political parties don’t work together with them politically. Rostalski, though, has her own personal definition of the term. She claims it is about "excluding the AfD from the discourse” and complains – in standard anti-Cancel-Culture rhetoric – that "the corridors of opinion are growing ever narrower,” as if it weren’t already possible to see AfD politicians on political talk shows almost every evening and as if their critique of Germany’s migration policy didn’t dominate the election campaign far beyond the limits of tolerability. The piece blithely trampled all over difficult dilemmas in the form of hastily assembled theses. I sincerely wonder: Why is such a sloppy, sensationalist op-ed targeting the mood of the moment and demanding a removal a privately-defined firewall – a piece that perfunctorily disavows more than a decade of reflective, deeply reported DER SPIEGEL journalism – allowed to stand without contradiction from the magazine’s editors? I don’t get it.

Dilemma Number Four: The strategic dilemma encountered by the center of society in the migration debate

This dilemma centers on the question of how Germany’s asylum policy, which is seen by the majority of Germans as being too lax, has fueled the rise of the populists. And how it might be possible for centrist parties to create a humane yet sufficiently stringent migration policy which weakens populism, on the one hand, without, on the other hand, simply parroting its narratives. This dilemma is one that the center of German society has not, thus far, discussed in a sufficiently concrete and solution-oriented manner or even approached with the necessary strategic realism. Instead, the established rituals continually take over and nothing happens. An asylum policy that unites humanitarian ideals, effective control, Germany’s economic interests and combating populism remains elusive. The result is a programmatic vacuum, a lack of policy – which is a perfect playground for populists.

A rare yet still occasional occurrence at DER SPIEGEL is the negligent adoption of populist narratives, such as the article that went along with the cover illustration, from 2024, depicted above. The image recalls the famous slashed canvasses of the artist Lucio Fontana, just that in contrast to Fontana’s art, a knife is jutting through from the back. The bold, black lettering reads "ARE WE SAFE?” complimented by the subtitle: "Crime Scene Germany: The Return of Violence.” The idea that the country is facing an uncontrolled spree of knife violence is, of course, a central pillar of AfD propaganda. One need only recall Alice Weidel’s jeremiad in the Bundestag in which she frothed about "state-supported men with knives.” Other AfD members have spoken of "knife terror,” "knife immigration,” "knife migrants,” "stabbing culture,” "knife Alis,” "experts for knife attacks,” "knife murder,” etc. etc. The DER SPIEGEL story behind the cover, in its presentation and style, is a strange hybrid, a mixture of breathless propaganda and serious analysis, of sordid sociology and precise dissection. On the one hand, the article suggestively presents individual instances of violence, using detailed descriptions in combination with sinister-looking yet staged symbol photos depicting a shady man in a hood or a shimmering knife blade in the black of night. On the other hand, the story itself describes a far more nuanced situation in which the data is muddled and the downward trend – toward more knife violence – is anything but clear and is in no way as dramatic as some would have you believe. Strange.

All in all, it serves to highlight the fact that there is a need in the democratic center of society to finally address migration with the necessary resoluteness – and not because (to highlight yet another popular narrative promulgated by the populists) 2029 will necessarily produce Germany’s second female chancellor in the form of AfD grande dame Alice Weidel. Such an inevitability doesn’t exist. The danger is that in these times of polycrisis, in which Germany needs nothing so much as a broad alliance for reform, the country’s societal center is unable to produce more than a preventative coalition rather than a proactive coalition. Fending off an AfD government is vital to preventing the country from drifting towards authoritarianism. But that is not a platform that will prepare Germany for the future.

What should be done? DER SPIEGEL, with its staff of some 600 editors and reporters, could leverage its vast journalistic strength to launch an effort to expand constructive journalism and present drafts and scenarios of a different kind of asylum policy that exhibits a balance between humanitarian approaches and effective controls. And all that with a deliberative intent rather than an educative intent – with the goal of augmenting the migration debate with more substance, more strategic acumen and humanity. And with the goal of confronting the breathless policymaking machine with its own lack of clear concepts. The representatives of an increasingly helpless political center, among whom I count myself and who don’t want to live even a single day in an AfD world, would be grateful. Really.

But let’s approach the question – What should be done? – in a more fundamental way. How to navigate the path from dilemma awareness to a transparent dilemma debate? The first proposal: One a month, two DER SPIEGEL editors debate their own positions and the magazine’s fundamental journalistic decisions – a DER SPIEGEL debate about DER SPIEGEL in DER SPIEGEL. It would be a new format for which models already exist. Such as the intellectually unsparing and extraordinarily instructive debate on political correctness and cancel culture between the two DER SPIEGEL journalists René Pfister and Jonas Schaible. The second proposal aims at providing readers with an expanded role in the discussion – beyond the oddly simplistic for-or-against buttons frequently seen on the website. My idea envisions readers discussing the magazine’s coverage directly with DER SPIEGEL journalists, ideally moderated by a senior editor. Key moments from the debate could then be presented on the website. One could call it "The Digital Audience Conference” or something like that. In this way, new forms of expression could be tested, governed by a transparency imperative which could be formulated as follows: "Provide your readers every conceivable opportunity to assess the quality of information you convey.”

My argument: The serious journalism of the future will be transparent and rooted in dialogue. Or it won’t exist at all. Claims of irrefutability have never been particularly credible, but now, fueled by the deeply mendacious grassroots rhetoric of Big Tech oligarchs and a populist, yet extremely effective, critique from elites and experts, they are increasingly becoming scandalous in their own right. Beyond that, journalism is under greater pressure than ever through the apparently unstoppable gravitational slide of the advertising market toward the digital behemoths and the attacks of those who accuse journalists of little more than a pack of liars. As such, a stabile relationship of trust and the solidarity of a paying readership is an absolute imperative. And for that reason alone, it is important to form a new pact with those who, in an earlier media epoch, were simply known as the audience (a famous line by journalism critic Jay Rosen). Today, this audience has long since begun producing its own media, ready to go live at any moment merely by taking their mobile phone out of their pocket. Classic journalism, as the fourth pillar of democracy, has been joined by a fifth pillar, made up of the networked many, a radically pluralistic public that follows its own rules – reporting, setting the agenda, commenting and publishing, sometimes constructive and inciteful, sometimes angry and shockingly simplistic, and often with tremendous impact. This redistribution of the journalistic balance of power also injects an unavoidable element of necessity into the project of opening up the traditional media to dialogue in the form of a vast, pulsating, never-ending conversation and debate.

But enough for now, dear readers. What do you think about DER SPIEGEL’s AfD coverage and about the need for discussion in the age in which we currently find ourselves?