Intelligence initiative

The News Enlightenment Initiative (INA) is an association of media scholars and journalists who want to draw the public's attention to topics and news that, in their opinion , are neglected by the German mass media .

The main activity is the publication of their annual report, the "Top 10 Neglected Topics".

The INA was established in May 1997 by the present Professor of Mass Communication at the Jacobs University Bremen , Peter Ludes , in Siegen founded. In the meantime, their headquarters have been relocated to Dortmund , and from October 2002 Horst Pöttker coordinated the project at the Dortmund Institute for Journalism. In 2014, Hektor Haarkötter took over the management of the University for Media, Communication and Economics (HMKW) in Cologne .

In March 2002 INA was nominated for the Grimme Online Award .

Structures

The organizational process corresponds to that of other initiatives to promote democracy , such as B. Bad word of the year . The suggestions for possible topics are collected throughout the year and checked by student research teams to determine whether they meet the INA's nomination criteria. Teams at the Technical University of Dortmund, the University of Bonn, the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences are currently researching for INA. A jury of media scientists and freelance journalists then methodically determines a ranking list for the year from the pool of nominated entries, which is then presented to the public. Proposals can be submitted by individuals or organizations by post, fax or email. In addition to instructions , there is also an online contact form on the homepage .

history

The initiators start from the premise that there is a pronounced " pack behavior " in the German media world , so-called topic booms and notoriously hidden topics. The US initiative Project Censored, which has existed for some time, served as a model . The long working in the US media researcher Peter Ludes collected with Imme de Haen , former director of the Henri Nannen - School of Journalism , Ingrid Kolb , Ulrich Saxer , Georg Schütte and Hermann Meyn in Siegen a founding team around to this state of affairs in the media to make it public and thereby provide some remedy.

Today's jurors come from various German federal states and are mainly journalists, humanities and social scientists . Well-known names are the journalists Hersch Fischler, Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti , Toralf Staud and Reiner Metzger as well as the media scientists Horst Pöttker (Technical University of Dortmund), Stephan Weichert (Institute for Media and Communication Policy in Berlin) and Caja Thimm (University of Bonn).

The top topics of 2013 are to be processed with the help of crowdfunding .

Since 2015 there has been a cooperation with the news desk of Deutschlandfunk and with Journalist , the magazine of the German Association of Journalists (DJV).

Nomination criteria

In principle, topics and news that can be nominated and in accordance with the relevance criteria (quote from the INA homepage):

• should be known to the population in Germany (and Europe), to which they have only limited or no access;
• are relevant for a large part of the population;
• are clearly designed and based on reliable, verifiable sources;
• Despite their importance, they have not yet been picked up or researched and published by the media (daily newspapers, magazines, news letters, radio, television, Internet, etc.);
• which are written in German or another European language.

Top 10 neglected topics (annual overview)

The following are the annual overviews back to 2005 on the "Top 10 neglected topics". All nominated topics from the last years up to 1997, including their reasons, can be found on the official website under "Top Topics".

Top 10 neglected topics 2019

1. JEFTA - The largest free trade agreement in the world
2. The transparent passenger - collection of passenger data in the EU
3. Venezuela and international law
4. Healthier water is possible - chemicals are usually not filtered
5. The foundation system - alms instead of social policy?
6. Child Labor for Bride Allowance - The Sumangali System in India
7. Prosperity and Democracy in Africa - The Example of Botswana
8. Dangerous cocktails - wrong medication in seniors
9. Internet crime - investigation rarely succeeds
10. Lifelong suffering - genital mutilation in Germany

Top 10 neglected topics in 2018

1. Inclusion in the world of work
2. Portugal overcomes the financial crisis - without saving
3. 2017 monsoons in South Asia versus hurricane in Texas
4. Precarious working conditions on container ships
5. Life-saving drugs are largely unaffordable in developing countries - the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable industries
6. Abolition of civil protection in Germany in the event of a nuclear disaster
7. Health hazards and lack of political regulation of shift work
8. Violence against workers in psychiatric institutions
9. The forced sterilization of Roma women in the Czech Republic
10. Humanitarian crisis in Chad

Top 10 neglected topics in 2017

1. Federal judge election illegal?
2. Most of the Bundeswehr's missions abroad are unknown
3. Costa Rica and other countries without a military
4. Can less food waste reduce hunger ?
5. Deregulation of au pair agencies in Germany through EU law
6. The role of the West in the Yemen conflict
7. Unreliable seal of approval leads to violence in horse training
8. Medicinal immobilization in nursing homes
9. Lack of protection of cultural assets in the event of a nuclear disaster
10. Bogus self-employment among freelancers

Top 10 neglected topics in 2016

1. Financing of nuclear weapons
2. EU and Euratom : Committed to promote nuclear power
3. Knockout drops : Free delivery and legal
4. The Xerox copier: Copiers swap numbers
5. Cell phone fraud: who makes money on WAP billing?
6. Simulated video surveillance: when the works council has nothing to report
7. Working conditions are seldom an issue
8. "Concrete injection" in psychiatry
9. Malnutrition in Cancer: Hospitals Could Do More
10. Police violence : a case from Cologne

Top 10 neglected topics in 2015

1. Sold Links : How the Media Undermines Credibility
2. Opaque finances for political foundations
3. Precarious conditions in training occupations
4. Questionable handling of patient data
5. White paper , dirty business
6. Monitoring in ski areas
7. Working conditions of prison officers
8. Facebook researches artificial intelligence
9. Million-Grab Police Software
10. Modern search by mobile phone

Top 10 neglected topics in 2013

1. In donation robes: How judges distribute money from processes without control ( monetary requirements )
2. The business of deportation ( asylum seekers , Frontex )
3. The UN World Food Program is not transparent
4. Lack of control by au pair agencies in Germany
5. The deaf generation ( hearing impaired )
6. E-Discovery : German company data for the USA
7. Bonus payments for doctors - even for non-approved medication ( off-label use )
8. Voluntourism : Doing business with a good deed abroad
9. Arms exports are insufficiently controlled ( end-use declaration )
10. Police bans on demonstrations declared unlawful ( G8 summit in Heiligendamm 2007 )

Top 10 neglected topics in 2012

1. No pension for working prisoners
2. HIV-positive on the job market: No legal protection against discrimination
3. Birth control pills - dangerous lifestyle drug
4. Further training for starvation wages
5. Hartz IV in case of illness - not an issue
6. Forgotten work, social and civil processes
7. Customer ratings purchased on the Internet
8. Miserable conditions in European prisons
9. The opaque humanitarian aid industry
10. Susceptibility to drug testing fraud

Top 10 neglected topics in 2011

1. Bank bailouts without effective parliamentary control
2. Comprehensive pollutants in schools in North Rhine-Westphalia
3. Military research at German universities
4. Basic right to health - not for everyone
5. Medical care in old people's homes inadequate
6. The forgotten war in the Caucasus
7. Doping in football
8. Alternative monetary systems
9. The nocebo effect
10. The plight of inventors in Germany

Top 10 neglected topics in 2010

No topics were set in 2010.

Top 10 neglected topics in 2009

1. Emergency in hospital: people in need of care left alone
2. Psychiatry: Federal Government bends UN Convention cope
3. War reporting distracts from civil peace strategies
4. Unlawful use of police force
5. Gaps in the financial supervision of churches
6. Inadequate declaration of added iodine in food
7. Patents on human genes and gene sequences
8. Schools for the deaf do not teach sign language
9. Insufficient control of German arms exports
10. Hazardous waste in building and renovation

Top 10 neglected topics in 2008

1. Too many offenders in psychiatry
2. Pharmaceutical industry infiltrates patient blogs
3. Copper pollution of the environment through replaceable brake pads
4. Dangerousness of strong psychotropic drugs
5. SED assets: Still hidden in Liechtenstein and elsewhere?
6. Dangers from uranium ammunition in war zones
7. General coverage of developing countries
8. Idealized image of the mother instead of reporting on postnatal depression
9. Undifferentiated reporting on migrants
10. Inhumane treatment of total objectors in the Bundeswehr

Top 8 neglected topics in 2007

1. Agreements on termination rates in the German cell phone network
2. Politicians hinder the establishment of ombudsmen
3. Loss of quality in journalism
4. Chemicals endanger fertility - a “ticking time bomb”?
5. Cities are tilting tree protection
6. The Switzerland adopts new nuclear power plants
7. Questionable foreign business of WestLB
8. Bundestag debates for the first time on compensation for German colonial crimes in Africa

Top 10 neglected topics in 2006

1. Lack of therapy places for drug addicts
2. Over a Million Political Prisoners in China - Inhuman Detention Conditions and Organ Trafficking ?
3. Power guzzler Internet
4. Biological weapons from the internet
5. When insiders sound the alarm - whistleblowers have a hard time in Germany
6. No future for the Sahrawis
7. MEADS : What advisers did the federal government rely on?
8. Agricultural subsidies : EU prevents timely public debate
9. Oil company thwarted climate protection policy
10. Flat-rate credit check

Top 10 neglected topics in 2005

1. The UN's fight against corruption - Germany is not included
2. Questionable use of voting machines
3. The pesticide boomerang: the forbidden poisons are coming back
4. Strategy of dependency: Iraqi farmers must royalties for seed pay
5. Secret services monitor digital communication in Europe in an uncontrolled manner
6. Fault in the system: How the “ green point ” is undermined
7. Germany is oversleeping the energy transition
8. EU chaos at the digital tachograph
9. Dirty credits
10. From petro-dollar to petro-euro: Iran is planning a new oil exchange

Günter Wallraff Prize for journalism criticism

Since 2015 the Initiative Nachrichtenaufklerung e. V. (INA) presented the Günter Wallraff Prize for journalism criticism endowed with 10,000 euros as part of the annual Cologne forum for journalism criticism at Deutschlandfunk . The INA has set itself the goal of honoring people or institutions who “deal critically with journalism in an original and balanced way”.

literature

• Horst Pöttker, Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti (eds.): Keeping silent? Repressed? To forget? Ten years of "Intelligence Initiative". VS-Verlag 2007
• Peter Ludes; Joachim Friedrich Staab; Georg Schütte: News hiding and intelligence clarification In: Concentration of power in the multimedia society? / Ed .: Heribert Schatz ... - Opladen, (1997). - pp. 139-156
• Peter Ludes and Georg Schütte: From the news to the news show: a German-American news comparison In: Medium: magazine for radio, television, film, press. - ISSN  0025-8350-23 (1993), Spezial, pp. 56-59
• Kristina Nolte: The fight for attention: how the media, business and politics are fighting for a scarce resource. Campus-Verl., Frankfurt / Main 2005. (Zugl .: Berlin, Univ., Dissertation 2004) 186 pp. ISBN 3-593-37904-X
• Georg Franck: Economy of Attention: A Design . Hanser, Munich 2003. 251 pp. ISBN 3-446-19348-0
• Michael Schetsche: Sociology of Knowledge of Social Problems. Foundation of a relativistic problem theory. West German publishing house, Opladen 2000.
• Stephen Hilgartner; Charles L. Bosk: The Rise and Fall of Social Problems: A Public Arenas Model. In: American Journal of Sociology 94, pp. 53-78. 1988
• Georg Schütte: Information specialists of the media company. The production and presentation of television news programs in the USA, the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1994. ISBN 3-8244-4164-0 (Zugl .: Dortmund, Univ., Diss., 1994)

Web links

• Homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ^ The Initiative Nachrichtenaufklerung eV Accessed on February 17, 2016 . 
3. ↑ http://www.derblindefleck.de/index.php/top-themen/
4. ↑ Top 10 2016
5. ↑ Overview of the neglected topics in recent years
6. ↑ derblindefleck.de
7. ^ Günter Wallraff Prize for criticism of journalism