Since News in Slow German switched to podcast format, I’ve found it impossible to stay motivated to listen. Turns out I really find it difficult to stay interested unless there’s video to go with the audio. I’m almost to the point where I don’t really need it communicated “slowly” anyway, so I think I could switch to a standard german news show, but which one?
So I’m wondering what the best news source is for German news? Also, I’d like to steer clear of news sources that have a conservative bias. I don’t know if Germany has an equivalent of Fox News, but anything like that would turn me off.
Watch Tagesschau. There is a video on Youtube about German news from the perspective of an US citizen who has moved to Germany. He says that, considering bias, German news cannot be compared to US news. Tagesschau is viewed by left-wing and right-wing persons, they report on events, they try to not comment them. They don’t reach this goal perfectly, of course, but if more than 95 percent of a country’s population consider a news format worth watching (and that country is not considered a dictatorship), that sounds pretty okay, right?
Tagesschau is indeed relatively neutral. When it comes to conservative news you will have a hard time in german media at least in regard to the traditional ones like television. Anything that is similar to Fox News doesn’t exist, but if you expand on the internet you can find conservative news reporting, too. Welt News is right-centrish imho and there is Nius, for example. Although I never watched the latter, so it’s hard to judge on the quality. I sometimes watch interviews with Ralf Schuler, who participates on Nius, so I can at least say that they are conservative.
If you want to get an idea on how Germans think about things going on in the world I would suggest you to not restrict yourself to a specific bias, though (I wouldn’t suggest that to anyone, to be honest). Most people I know, including myself, have a much more differentiated view on most topics and are not conservative or liberal or whatever in every matter. I mean, if I would base my opinion on US-Americans on Fox News only … I rather leave that sentence unfinished.
Well, everybody gave you already great advice. I just wanted to congratulate you for your next step in learning this language. If you will be able to digest standard news, I guess you soon won’t have any problem to find channels that interest you.
There’s so much German content it’s pretty crazy…here’s some more youtube channels I have in my subscriptions (btw, good idea to create a separate account/channel that you keep for strictly watching german content…you’ll get all kinds of other things popping up on it).
Here’s a list of some other youtube channels to checkout if the above weren’t enough from Andrea… (no idea on the leaning)
Bayerischer Rundfunk
Hessischer Rundfunk
NDR Doku
follow me.reports
DW Doku
Stuttgarter Zeitung
WDR
Frontal
MDR DOK
There’s so many more news, documentary, reporting it’s hard to list them all =).
If you don’t mind being outside the LingQ confines, download the ARD Mediathek app and you can watch tv, documentary, movies, etc from a bunch of the public channels across Germany. VPN not needed for the “on demand” stuff. VPN needed for live. Subtitiles on most of them, although I’m not sure how to import them into LingQ, so this would just be for outside LingQ. There are also children’s programs.
