SPIEGEL Online

I'd seen a lot of things. I was no virgin to life. Yet some things made me sad, never mind what I had witnessed so far.

One of those things was the SPIEGEL website, called SPIEGEL online, or SPON. (Just for the global readers, if one of those should ever happen to stumble upon this site.) To make a long story short: it was crap.

To make things worse (and explain some of my exasperation), I still could remember the times of childhood - of not-so-innocent days of childhood, that is, when the interest in the world and the machinations of its leaders and debauchers began to raise its head. Back in those times (a mere ten or twelve years ago), the SPIEGEL was an acknowledged doyen of German journalism. Was.

Nowadays, its headlines (anyway in the online version) were indistinguishable from those of Focus, for example, yet another German local rag and part of the tabloid press. In fact, the SPIEGEL had been descending into these realms for the last few years, since the death of its founder, Rudolf Augstein, and there was no remedy in sight.

Just to sum up the headlines of today:
Experten verzweifeln an der Mega-Krise (Experts despair of the Mega-Crisis)
So soll Deutschland das Klima retten (Thus Germany is supposed to save the climate)
Warum Hessen rockt (Why Hesse rocks)
- headlines that are more evocative of the Sun (or of BILD) than the NY Times, in whose league the SPIEGEL once used to play...

The golden days of serious and sincere German journalism had passed. So much for that.