It is not surprising that Karl Lauterbach was the most frequent guest on the corona talk shows on public service broadcasters. You could see him 22 times Anne Will, Maybrit Illner and Co. see. Almost twice as often as number two, Melanie Brinkmann. You can read about this in a new study on Corona reporting in selected German talk shows, which was presented on Monday at a congress of the Rudolf Augstein Foundation in Berlin. Depending on whether you count him as a scientist or a politician, Lauterbach also drives the number of SPD politicians invited to the talk shows to the top. Let’s put it this way: Its omnipresence is an expression of the wet dream of a kind of super health minister dissolving the difficult relationship between science and politics into authoritarian air. The third role that has to be filled in the talk shows, that of the journalist, could be taken on by the manic twitterer Lauterbach.
No one like Robby Schlund was invited; Until he left the party, he was considered “the health expert of the AfD”, is a doctor and also has strong journalistic opinions on Corona: He became known for holding up a poster on which Söder, Drosten and Lauterbach can be seen as convicts. You don’t want to defend such a figure, but with her a whole milieu was kept out of the talk shows. It should be remembered that it was not Lauterbach who wrote a bestseller about Covid, but the virologist Sucharit Bhakdi. Also not a guest of the shows. The study proves what one suspected for a long time: A small group populates the genre, always the same politicians, the same scientists in the same field, hardly any sociologists, no theologians.
If you had invited someone like Bhakdi, who claims that Corona is no more dangerous than influenza, it would have been a “false balance”, they say. A marginal scientific position would have been given the same rank as broad consensus in research – a dangerous incentive for the unenlightened part of the population. This approach fails to recognize that the established media have lost many people to alternative media because they shied away from dealing with the bah positions. And nothing against scientific education, even on political talk shows, as celebrated in the discussion about the study. But it narrows the discourse. Anyone who doubts, and there are many of them, wants to reassure them by pointing out that the “uncertainty” has already been priced into the scientific knowledge process, will miss the effect.
Most of the talk shows were about the “measures”, least of all about “Corona deniers”. What this crisis is actually about was kept silent: dying and death do not even appear as parameters of their own. It is possible that they have gone into “other topics”.
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