Berlin – In its reporting on the Diogo case, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) violated journalistic due diligence “in one point”. This is the result of the Leipzig program committee of the MDR. The criticism refers to the 2017 article “Guilt without atonement” about the death of the Mozambican GDR contract worker Manuel Diogo. In it, amateur actors disguised as neo-Nazis act out a racist attack, and an MDR reporter breaks the news to the old mother Diogos about her son’s murder, although in reality there was neither a neo-Nazi attack nor a murder.
The program committee had the “written interview with the mother” sent to it and determined: The off-text “which gives the viewer a fixed opinion and a hard confrontation by the mother with this statement” does not correspond to reality. Reality is distorted and not depicted in real terms. This is what the committee chairman Manfred Böhme writes in his report to the MDR director Karola Wille. It goes on to say that journalistic due diligence is violated. There is no truthful and factual reporting in the scene towards the viewer.
The MDR program committee, an honorary control body of the Broadcasting Council, advises the director, monitors the fulfillment of the MDR state mandate and examines complaints. The Manuel Diogo case involved a program complaint by the “Standing Audience Conference”, an association that investigates abuses in public broadcasting.
The complaint of the “Permanent Public Conference”
Manuel Diogo came to East Germany in 1981 and worked in the Jeber-Bergfrieden sawmill until his death in 1986. GDR investigators found that he was drunk, missed the exit and jumped in front of an oncoming train on the open road. An accident. More than 30 years later, however, it was suddenly said that Diogo had been brutally murdered by neo-Nazis and that state security had covered up the crime. The MDR spread the thesis in several television programs. In a small request to the state government, the Brandenburg left-wing politician Andrea Johlige called for “the true circumstances” to finally be brought to light.
The public prosecutor’s office in Potsdam complied with this request in June 2020 and announced in March 2021 after eight months of “intensive examinations” that they had found “no indication of a homicide or manipulation”. The Berliner Zeitung had previously come to the same conclusion through its own investigative research.
The MDR published the statement from the public prosecutor’s office, but saw “no reason” to tell viewers that they had been incorrectly informed by the broadcaster and supported its authors Tom Fugmann and Christian Bergmann.
In April 2021, the “Permanent Public Conference” submitted a program complaint. The chairwoman, Maren Müller, criticized how the MDR film team traveled “at the expense of the contributors to Mozambique” to “confront the old mother Diogo and her family with the invented story”, spoke of a “media duck” and called for the MDR to apologize to the family and viewers and to correct the reports. “The made-up story should be corrected promptly in a prominent slot,” says Müller.
Your complaint was rejected by the broadcaster at the end of April, like that of historian Ulrich van der Heyden before it. In the justification of the legal director of the MDR, Jens-Ole Schröder, it said: “The procedure corresponds to the requirement of compliance with journalistic due diligence.” MDR published does not mean at the same time “that the reporting of the MDR is wrong, invented or untrue”.
“Thin facts and inconsistencies”
Maren Müller filed an objection against the rejection and in her justification drew attention to the “thin facts and the inconsistencies” “which are revealed both by the MDR documentation at issue and by Dr. Schröder’s remarks”. According to Müller, the approach taken by the filmmakers Christian Bergmann and Tom Fugmann in the case of Manuel Diogo “does not correspond to the requirement of compliance with journalistic duties of care”. It seems more like “the story was designed with the desired outcome in mind.”
The entry was also rejected. A consultant for the director told Müller in August: The “matter” would now be presented to the responsible committee of the Broadcasting Council.
He examined the case on September 28, 2021. The result of this examination has been available since December, but sounds more like an admission of a formal error than a media scandal. The program committee only criticizes one passage, the “off-text” in the interview with Diogo’s mother, which “does not correspond to reality”, it is said.
In the off-text, the viewer learns that the MDR reporter tells the mother that her son was killed by a group of neo-Nazis. What the reporter Christian Bergmann says to the mother instead, why she bursts into tears in the interview with him, speaks “of these bandits”, says she is happy to know the truth now, the program committee does not say. Only so much: The interview “fully corresponds” to the expectations of the journalistic principles of the ÖRR, “in particular, a violation of the mother’s dignity could not be determined”. That cannot be checked. The Berliner Zeitung has neither the “written interview” nor the rough cut of the scene.
The program committee did not examine it either. Committee head Manfred Böhme told the Berliner Zeitung: “We didn’t go to the rough cut level. We deal with the posts that have been sent. That is our job, especially when dealing with complaints. A limit has been reached for voluntary committee work. Otherwise it would rather be the work of a committee of inquiry. That would go too far.”
Manfred Böhme is director of the State Tourism Association of Saxony eV and an honorary member of the MDR Broadcasting Council, but also a member of the Board of the SME and Business Association (MIT) of the CDU Saxony and a member of the Supervisory Board of the State Palaces, Castles and Gardens of Saxony GmbH. You can reach him by phone in the car or during the lunch break. He seems friendly, tries hard, but also a bit overwhelmed with the case.
We were not able to deal in depth with the research of the Berliner Zeitung. The complexity of the matter is very great.
Manfred Böhme, chairman of the MDR program committee
Maren Müller is not surprised by Böhme’s “multifunctions”, as she calls it. “How is he going to find the time to deal with a large project like investigating the Diogo case?” she asks. She explicitly asked the broadcasting councils to listen to the Berliner Zeitung podcast on the case and was sure that hardly anyone had done so due to lack of time.
Were consequences drawn?
Böhme says: “We were not able to deal with the research of the Berliner Zeitung in depth. The complexity of the entire issue is very great.”
Nevertheless, it is important for him to emphasize that the committee dealt “very intensively” with MDR’s Diogo reporting. For example, the re-enactment of the murder scene was discussed with amateur actors. “We were of the opinion: the limits have been reached in this contribution.” When asked why there is nothing about this in the committee’s statement, he replies: “If it says that we have dealt with it intensively, you can assume that that consequences were drawn. That’s where I trust Klaus Brink Bäumer.”
Brink Bäumer was Spiegel editor-in-chief, among other things, at the time of the Relotius forgeries. He has been program manager at MDR in Leipzig since early 2021. At a Broadcasting Council meeting in early May 2021, he declared that he did not see the “need for a correction” in the Diogo case.
The program committee has now asked the editorial staff of the MDR to deal intensively with quality standards for “reporting of suspicious activities”. When asked whether the editors followed the request, there was no answer from the broadcaster. An MDR spokesman only says: “The broadcasting council has essentially rejected the program complaint and granted it in one point.” And in an email to Maren Müller, director Karola Wille declared the “present procedure” to be complete.
If you enter the name “Manuel Diogo” in the search field of the MDR website eleven months after the Potsdam public prosecutor’s office, no correction, no correction appears, but a single article with the headline: “Campaign journalism 2018 and today”. It is not about the broadcaster’s misconduct, but about the extensive research by the Berliner Zeitung on the case. There is talk of a journalism that “smells strictly” and the “sound of the so-called alternative media”.
Maren Müller from the audience conference says: “The research work of those journalists who rightly point out the failure of the MDR is discredited in a hateful and at the same time clueless manner. You can’t admit you’ve made a mistake, because what shouldn’t be can’t be.”