Beware of experts!
Do you know those relationship disputes in which one partner wants to outdo the other in argument by listing who in his circle of friends agrees with him? "That was really not okay of you, X and Y said that too!" There is also an equivalent in political discourse: the expert.
By Bent-Erik Scholz
By Bent-Erik Scholz
Germans love their experts, on our television people are only allowed to tell the biggest nonsense in the world if they have studied or have a bizarre hobby. The nation's media companies keep aristocratic and football experts who only touch on their topic in practice, but who, in the safety of the production studio, shielded from reality, announce the most astonishing things, which can be summarized as: opinion with marginally better information . When the going gets tough, the body language experts have to step in for the click farm online media, whose target group is the stupidest of the doomscrollers (dumb scrollers?), i.e. t-online and the like.
These also come to remarkable results: body language expert Stefan Verra recognizes Joe Biden's speech on March 7 as a "fresh US president who succeeds in enthralling his audience," but: "He's advanced in age the 81-year-old [...] then noted." Potzblitz. Only an expert can come to such groundbreaking insights. Stefan Verra studied drums and music education, he worked as a professional musician until the turn of the millennium, and since then he has been concerned with body language, whatever that means. Did he read a few books or watch a few drunks gesticulating wildly in the corner bar? It doesn't really matter: you don't have to present a diploma in order to call yourself an expert and be able to make pithy punch lines in newspaper interviews, such as the vague prediction that Sebastian Kurz would one day fall on his feet with his body language.
The fact that experts are a popular measure in German media products to stir up otherwise quite banal connections a little and thereby satisfy the Teutonic desire for order and authority is also gaining ground in political journalism: When Donald Trump mentioned the names of Joe during a speech some time ago Mixed up Biden and Barack Obama, the Rheinische Post invited psychiatrist John Gartner, who cited the Dementia Care Society's definition, according to which word-finding difficulties, which Trump often seems to have, and confusion between people are a sign of dementia. Gartner says here sentences like "This is a hard clinical finding of serious organic brain damage." All brain damage is organic because the brain is an organ. In the end, John Gartner makes the following statement: "Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is deteriorating ."
You have to imagine this: a professional, experienced psychiatrist who has held a chair at Hopkins University for three decades, remotely diagnoses a person he has never met in person with a serious cognitive disorder based on a few video clips. Would you go to a doctor who you know speaks this way about patients? "Trump's brain is deteriorating"? Gartner would rightly get a slap in the face from any colleague who was serious about his job. Especially since Trump wasn't even a patient, it's exclusively a remote diagnosis based on the smallest insight into the presumed inner workings of the patient Ex-presidents. This is actually forbidden for any serious psychiatrist. The fact that this is a "hard clinical finding" is simply a lie. Especially since it is debatable whether a psychiatrist is really an expert when it comes to a clinical picture that is not primarily psychological, but neurological.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, military experts have been on podcasts, talk shows and discussion groups everywhere. There are some colleagues who appear on screens and in front of microphones significantly more often than others. We already saw this clearly during the Corona pandemic, when Twitter users without any medical background, based on half-heartedly googled information, presumed to be able to determine who was right and who was wrong: Christian Drosten or Hendrik Streeck? People who had never seen the inside of a laboratory in their lives became online professors, praising one and booing the other, and the media reacted: Christian Drosten and Karl Lauterbach were the most visible "experts". Things like Covid-19, which was extremely questionable, not least because of Lauterbach's later power and some adventurous quotes on his part. Again, a doctor who claims that a medication is free of side effects would get a completely justified wad from every one of his colleagues.
Even if a military expert is needed, the majority of German media companies fish in a comparatively small pool. However, this consists not least of theorists: the most popular German military expert, Carlo Masala, is a political scientist by training, many of his publications deal with international relations, his knowledge in this area cannot be denied - but with an understanding of international conflicts comes an understanding the practice of war? How does Carlo Masala come to repeat in interviews as a matter of course that Taurus cruise missiles give Ukraine an advantage in combat when the Inspector General of the Air Force is in the Taurus leak with regard to the 50 to 100 Taurus missiles that Germany could deliver , explicitly says: "This will not change the war"? How does this coincide with the persistent, mantra-like repeated claims in articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine that Taurus is a "game changer"?
One of the hundreds of catchphrases of the Corona crisis was "anti-science", which was mostly complained about by those who were most guilty of it, namely by creating something like "science" in the first place, and not a continuous stream the formulation of thesis, the testing, the correction, the beauty of which lies mainly in the fact that nothing is ever really certain. In terms of geological history, it wasn't long ago that we thought of our planet as a disk at the center of the universe. In the last century we were still talking about "healthy" light cigarettes; for a time, tobacco smoke was even considered so beneficial to health that it was administered as a medicinal smoke through an enema. If you were sick a few centuries ago, you might have been prescribed smoking through the asshole, which - after all - probably carries a significantly lower risk of lung cancer than oral intake.
Journalism is basically the study of asking questions and skillfully pursuing them in order to ultimately find the answer based on credible evidence. New Journalism formulates a question that it answers itself and then looks for evidence for the answer it has already found. For every attitude in the world, an expert can be found somewhere: What is Christian Drosten to one person is Sucharit Bhakdi to another. The impulse, however, remains primitive: to maintain the reality I desire, I seek an authority to confirm it.
Do you know who would vehemently reject such a working method? Scientist.
03/20/24
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB
These also come to remarkable results: body language expert Stefan Verra recognizes Joe Biden's speech on March 7 as a "fresh US president who succeeds in enthralling his audience," but: "He's advanced in age the 81-year-old [...] then noted." Potzblitz. Only an expert can come to such groundbreaking insights. Stefan Verra studied drums and music education, he worked as a professional musician until the turn of the millennium, and since then he has been concerned with body language, whatever that means. Did he read a few books or watch a few drunks gesticulating wildly in the corner bar? It doesn't really matter: you don't have to present a diploma in order to call yourself an expert and be able to make pithy punch lines in newspaper interviews, such as the vague prediction that Sebastian Kurz would one day fall on his feet with his body language.
The fact that experts are a popular measure in German media products to stir up otherwise quite banal connections a little and thereby satisfy the Teutonic desire for order and authority is also gaining ground in political journalism: When Donald Trump mentioned the names of Joe during a speech some time ago Mixed up Biden and Barack Obama, the Rheinische Post invited psychiatrist John Gartner, who cited the Dementia Care Society's definition, according to which word-finding difficulties, which Trump often seems to have, and confusion between people are a sign of dementia. Gartner says here sentences like "This is a hard clinical finding of serious organic brain damage." All brain damage is organic because the brain is an organ. In the end, John Gartner makes the following statement: "Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is deteriorating ."
You have to imagine this: a professional, experienced psychiatrist who has held a chair at Hopkins University for three decades, remotely diagnoses a person he has never met in person with a serious cognitive disorder based on a few video clips. Would you go to a doctor who you know speaks this way about patients? "Trump's brain is deteriorating"? Gartner would rightly get a slap in the face from any colleague who was serious about his job. Especially since Trump wasn't even a patient, it's exclusively a remote diagnosis based on the smallest insight into the presumed inner workings of the patient Ex-presidents. This is actually forbidden for any serious psychiatrist. The fact that this is a "hard clinical finding" is simply a lie. Especially since it is debatable whether a psychiatrist is really an expert when it comes to a clinical picture that is not primarily psychological, but neurological.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, military experts have been on podcasts, talk shows and discussion groups everywhere. There are some colleagues who appear on screens and in front of microphones significantly more often than others. We already saw this clearly during the Corona pandemic, when Twitter users without any medical background, based on half-heartedly googled information, presumed to be able to determine who was right and who was wrong: Christian Drosten or Hendrik Streeck? People who had never seen the inside of a laboratory in their lives became online professors, praising one and booing the other, and the media reacted: Christian Drosten and Karl Lauterbach were the most visible "experts". Things like Covid-19, which was extremely questionable, not least because of Lauterbach's later power and some adventurous quotes on his part. Again, a doctor who claims that a medication is free of side effects would get a completely justified wad from every one of his colleagues.
Even if a military expert is needed, the majority of German media companies fish in a comparatively small pool. However, this consists not least of theorists: the most popular German military expert, Carlo Masala, is a political scientist by training, many of his publications deal with international relations, his knowledge in this area cannot be denied - but with an understanding of international conflicts comes an understanding the practice of war? How does Carlo Masala come to repeat in interviews as a matter of course that Taurus cruise missiles give Ukraine an advantage in combat when the Inspector General of the Air Force is in the Taurus leak with regard to the 50 to 100 Taurus missiles that Germany could deliver , explicitly says: "This will not change the war"? How does this coincide with the persistent, mantra-like repeated claims in articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine that Taurus is a "game changer"?
One of the hundreds of catchphrases of the Corona crisis was "anti-science", which was mostly complained about by those who were most guilty of it, namely by creating something like "science" in the first place, and not a continuous stream the formulation of thesis, the testing, the correction, the beauty of which lies mainly in the fact that nothing is ever really certain. In terms of geological history, it wasn't long ago that we thought of our planet as a disk at the center of the universe. In the last century we were still talking about "healthy" light cigarettes; for a time, tobacco smoke was even considered so beneficial to health that it was administered as a medicinal smoke through an enema. If you were sick a few centuries ago, you might have been prescribed smoking through the asshole, which - after all - probably carries a significantly lower risk of lung cancer than oral intake.
Journalism is basically the study of asking questions and skillfully pursuing them in order to ultimately find the answer based on credible evidence. New Journalism formulates a question that it answers itself and then looks for evidence for the answer it has already found. For every attitude in the world, an expert can be found somewhere: What is Christian Drosten to one person is Sucharit Bhakdi to another. The impulse, however, remains primitive: to maintain the reality I desire, I seek an authority to confirm it.
Do you know who would vehemently reject such a working method? Scientist.
03/20/24
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB
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