Friday, June 25, 2010

The media's lies

Making small mistakes like typos or sentences repeating over and over is something tolerable. But when facts are conveyed wrong because of serious carelessness or even the attempt to lie, then that is a problem.



T-online.de crossed the line. Their article "Barely any unemployed people in 2025" states that, according to a research institute, there would only be 1.5 million unemployed people in Germany in 2025. At the same time they said there were up to 5 million unemployed people right now.

The prospect of employment changing so rapidly seemed unrealistic to me. I checked the website of the institute. And guess what? They did NOT say that! They said the number of unemployed persons would decrease by 1.5 million, not to 1.5. million. Do the math! It's a big difference!

This is especially annoying when you consider that I work for the national employment agency. Many comments by angry citizens on the t-online website stated that the statistics were fake, that we are all assholes, and so on. Well, you see what happens when newspapers and online services give people the wrong image. They get their clicks, their views, their money, their attention, we have to suffer. And the people.... they get lied to.

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