Newsroom Disputes – Covering the Euro Crisis is delicate and sometimes hotly disputed

By Max Hänska

Differences in reporting (and understanding) the Euro crisis don’t only exist between countries of the Euro zone. Within newsrooms themselves the appropriate way to cover and report the crisis is also disputed.

A recent example from Germany illustrates this. Bettina Schulz, the London correspondent the German opinion leading daily Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung (FAZ), was recalled from her posting after criticising her paper’s news coverage of the crisis.

Schulz felt that an article in the FAZ which criticised Mario Draghi’s announcement in July 2012 that the ECB would do “whatever it takes to preserve the euro” had overstepped the paper’s editorial line and taken a turn towards campaigning journalism (campaigning the line of Bundesbank chief Weidmann) at the expense of balanced factual reporting.

Ostensibly this dispute led to her being recalled from her posting in London, a decision that she is challenging in a German court (decision pending).

The euro crisis is a hotly disputed topic: what are its causes, what the solutions? Who are its victims and who are its culprits? But it has not only raised tensions in intra-European relations but also within newsrooms.