How Media Fuels War. Confessions Of A Former News Editor | Dr. Helmut Scheben

Why does mainstream journalism these days sound like a record with the same skip over and over again? Why do we already know when we open the newspapers what kind of framing we’ll be served today? And what does journalism have to do with war narratives? That’s what I’m discussing today with a former editor of the Swiss Tagesschau, Dr. Helmut Scheben. After completing his doctorate at the University of Bonn, Dr. Scheben worked for 5 years as a press agency reporter and correspondent in Mexico and Central America before becoming an editor at the weekly newspaper (WoZ) in Zurich in 1986. From 1993 to 2012, he was then an editor and reporter at Swiss television SRF, spending 16 years on the Tagesschau—the most important daily news program in Switzerland. Dr. Scheben has spent many years as a media professional dealing with war and in recent years, increasingly, with the construction of war in the media—meaning the portrayal of war in local journalism. Last year, he published an essay on this topic titled ’How I Lost Faith in the Established Media’. Dr. Scheben’s (german language) essay: