RTL corrects itself to an incorrectly distributed tweet by former AfD politician Frauke Petry. He was featured in a tabloid magazine feature Explosive Weekend from August 5 about the singer Trong Hieu Nguyen faded in. The reporter and moderator Maurice Gajda said in the post that when he saw the singer Trong perform in the preliminary round of the Eurovision Song Contest 2023, friends sent him a tweet from Frauke Petry. Gajda then reads the quote from his cell phone, and the text also appears graphically in the image: “I don’t think any normal German wants to see a pink-colored Asian at the ESC.”
Former AfD chairman Petry herself complained on Tuesday on platform X, formerly Twitter, that she had not written the tweet. “@RTL_com impressively demonstrates how to deal with politically uncomfortable people,” says Petry, “you think up a racist tweet, a graphic designer implements it, and the fake is done.”
The RTL post says the tweet has already been deleted. But it can’t be found in online archives either, and there don’t seem to be any screenshots either, as can be seen from the overlay at Explosive Weekend is suggested. There was a tweet from Petry about ESC that was similar in content and later deleted: “I can’t imagine that normal citizens want to be ‘represented’ by these pink gentlemen… #ESC2023”, which, however, affects the band Lord of the Lost related, not to Trong.
“We will sharpen our journalistic guidelines again.”
RTL announces that “our reporter continues to vouch for the content of the tweet”. However, he did not take a screenshot of it and included it for the post Explosive Weekend “recreated”. This graphical implementation “in the design of Frauke Petry’s Twitter profile violates our journalistic guidelines,” according to a spokeswoman. We apologize for that.
The incident has consequences for the reporter: “We are suspending our cooperation with Maurice Gajda until further notice, until the allegations in the room have been clarified.” You work in a “close-meshed and multi-stage acceptance process with the minimum requirement of a four-eyes principle,” the spokeswoman continued. “The graphically and incorrectly created tweet offered the responsible broadcast CVDs no point of reference to question journalistic integrity.” The guidelines for this will be “sharpened again in this regard”.