diesseits und jenseits des Atlantiks (on both sides of the Atlantic) was the title of the February Stammtisch of the Freiburg-Madison-Gesellschaft. As in previous years, Red Baron opened the series of Stammtisch introducing the subject.
According to Wikipedia, fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. The article also contains the term "Lügenpresse," which is specific to Germany. Lügenpresse goes back to the revolution of 1848, was widely used by the Nazis, and is cheerfully celebrated by PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident).
Wikipedia continues: False information is often caused by reporters paying sources for stories, an unethical practice called checkbook journalism. The news is then often reverberated as misinformation in social media but occasionally finds its way to the mainstream media as well.
Where rumors used to make their local rounds, nowadays, fake news spreads across the globe via social media in seconds. Some serious news media such as the BBC, POLITICO, or The Economic Times run special columns with the headline "Fake News."
During the 2016 US presidential election, journalists noticed an increase in made-up stories on Facebook that became viral. Strangely enough, most of the stories came from the Balkans. A small town called Veles in Macedonia was identified as a nest then. One of the fakers told a visiting BBC reporter team, "Americans love our stories, and we make money from them. Who cares if they are true or false?"
In December 2016, Hillary Clinton's speech condemned "the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda flooding the social media" and went on. "It's now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences," not yet thinking she would lose the election.
There even are notable fake news authors like Christopher Blair, called the godfather of fake news, who once launched the following message: "Clinton Foundation Ship Seized at Port of Baltimore Carrying Drugs, Guns, and Sex Slaves." Such communication is eagerly absorbed and spread by social media. But isn't Christopher Blair fake, too?
Nowadays, the web is also full of so-called deep fake, manipulated videos that make KGB's* black and white photos on which disgraced party officials were retouched look old.
*former Russian secret police
I shall spare my American readers the list of fake news spread by POTUS in the State of the Union (SOTU) speech just one day before FMG's February event. However, those at the Stammtisch mentioned and commented on them in the following discussion. The NYT analyzed the "alternative news" in SOTU, so I refer to the article. Isn't it a sad fact that the relevance of fake news has so much increased in post-truth politics?
Let me give you a recent example of fake news from Germany instead. You may have read that the diesel gate scandal deeply traumatized our car-loving nation. Our auto industry has cheated on its customers by manipulating vehicles' exhaust emissions of diesel engines. In some cases, the emission of nitrogen oxides (NOx) turned out to be an order of magnitude higher than the limits laid down by the European Union (EU) and cast into national law.
One of the consequences of these higher NOx emissions was that many air measuring stations in cities located at thoroughfares showed immission* values in the air above 40 µg/m³, the concentration limit for "members of the public" in the EU.
*NOx emitted from an exhaust pipe is "immited" into the atmosphere
These high air concentrations of NOx have already led to driving bans for "dirty" diesel engine cars in some cities, notably in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg's state capital. Therefore, diesel car lovers cast envious glances at the States where the immission limit prescribed by EPA is 103 µg/m³. On the other hand, the emission values for cars in the States are stricter than in Europe, i.e., 70 mg/mi (≈43 mg/km) versus 80 mg/km. Such low values can only be reached by a selective catalytic reduction of NOx with the help of urea, called the AdBlue technique in Europe.
With the burden of the diesel gate still heavy on their shoulders, German car manufacturers held back with arguments regarding increasing the European immission level, but don't they have any allies?
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| Lung specialist Dieter Köhler and EP deputy Peter Liese (©BZ) |
Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) immediately took up the manifesto and described it as an important initiative to bring objectivity and facts into the diesel debate, "The scientific approach has the weight to overcome the approach of prohibiting, restricting, and annoying."
The chairman of the Free Democrats (FDP), Christian Lindner, doubled, "We can no longer allow mobility and key industries to suffer because purely ideological concentration limits are pursued."
The transport expert of the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Dirk Spaniel, felt astonished that "only under pressure from a whole armada of medical specialists is a pressure exerted on the absurd concentration limit policy of the CDU/CSU and SPD government coalition."
All three gentlemen are contradicted:
1. There is too much approach in Scheuer's statement, and Köhler's criticism of the current concentration limit is purely polemic and definitely not a scientific approach.
2. The present concentration limits of NOx and fine dust in the air are not ideological but based on the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations and were adopted by the European Union (EU). Germany has legally bound the concentration limits in its 39th Bundesimmissionsschutzverordnung (Federal Immission Control Ordinance).
*My English-speaking readers will love that word
3. There is too much pressure in Spaniel's statement. The present limits have nothing to do with CDU/CSU and SPD policies but are: Read under 2.
More than 5500 specialists are organized in the two societies of adult and pediatric pneumatologists, the German Society for Pneumology and Respiratory Medicine (DGP) and the German Association of Lung Specialists for Children and Adolescent (GPP), of whom just 1.8% of its members have signed the manifesto. They are not an armada.
The GPP wrote, "We stand behind the WHO recommendations. 70,000 scientific publications prove the harmful effects of NOx and fine dust on health. For 30 years, the WHO has regularly checked the limits and confirmed the "correctness (?)" of the 40 µg/m³ concentration for NOx. The limit primarily serves to protect risk groups such as children, pregnant women, and the sick."
The President of the European Pneumatological Society (EPS), the Professional Association of Pneumologists (BdP), and the DGP also clearly contradicted the "100" who have shed doubt on the present limits, "The questioning of scientific statements in general terms, without citing evidence, is not serious. Anyone spreading public doubts about the harmful potential of air pollutants without quoting scientific work violates the principles of medical-scientific ethos"... and spreads fake news, I like to add.
Köhler was unimpressed. At the invitation of Peter Liese, a European Parliament (EP) member, he went into the lion's den to Brussels. There, Köhler became virulent concerning the concentration limits for NOx and fine dust, "Not a single German was consulted or medically examined. The risks found are in the percentage range. Smokers are exposed to concentrations that are one thousand times higher."
Yes, most smokers know about the risks of smoking and accept them. To defend his standpoint on the imposed concentration limits, Köhler used the far-fetched argument that other factors were given too little weight in previous studies. Lower-income people have an unhealthy lifestyle - considerable nicotine and alcohol consumption - and frequently live on pollutant-loaded thoroughfare roads.
While in Brussels, Köhler clashed with Holger Schulz, an epidemiologist at Munich's Helmholtz Centre. According to Schulz, the body reacts to the most minor amounts of pollutants with inflammation, so the harmful effects of low concentrations are disproportionately severe.
Listening, EU Commissioner for the Environment Karmenu Vella was untouched by the dispute. He considered the present limits scientifically sound and even pleaded to lower the existing values.
Meanwhile, the government coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD agreed that driving bans should only be appropriate if the annual average air pollution exceeds 50 µg/m³ of NOx instead of 40. Since Germany and France are the two supporting pillars of the EU, it is no wonder that the EU Commission accommodated the Federal Government in the dispute over concentration limits and diesel car driving bans four days ago. The Commission decided it had no objections to the coalition's plans to take a more generous approach to the concentration limit for NOx.
Last year's concentration levels at Freiburg's thoroughfare, the Federal Highway 31, were 49 µg/m³. Aren't we lucky that the coalition government plans to pass a law "allowing" 50 µg/m³ as soon as possible? Therefore, driving bans in Freiburg are off the table.
To complicate things further. Köhler himself now admits that some of his calculations are incorrect. Even so, Federal Transport Minister Scheuer sees no reason to dissociate himself from Dieter Köhler, "The manifesto of the lung specialists has reopened the debate on the European NOx limits."
Red Baron shakes his head.
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