Wir berichten. Sie entscheiden.
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG · GERMANYAGENCY RESTORED
Germany's Mission Years pitch - reporting on one side, judgment on yours.
Wir berichten. Sie entscheiden. We report. You decide. The German equivalent of the Trump-era and Brexit-era trust pitch from the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich - and a deliberate inversion of the Fox News we report, you decide line, which by 2017 had become shorthand for false balance.
The German version meant something different. After Brexit, after the US election, with the AfD rising and German Twitter saturated with imported disinformation, SZ offered a clean separation of duties. Reporting is the newspaper’s job. Judgment is the reader’s. The slogan refused both the populist accusation that journalism was telling people what to think and the social-platform fantasy that everyone already knew the truth and only needed a feed.
The line restored intellectual agency. It said: we will not editorialize the world for you, and we will not be reduced to one more angry voice in your timeline. The trust pitch was procedural rather than emotional - and in a media culture that still remembers what state propaganda actually looks like, procedural was the strongest claim available.