…Now That Was Checkpoint Charlie For Us

For a moment most of our colleagues thought our 4 weeks of attending the iij Summer Academy course was over.

We thought we were at the airport been checked before we board our various flights but that was direct opposite to the situation.

Checkpoint Charlie happens to be the security checkpoint in Berlin for the Americans and the Russians during the war in Germany and the situation we went through was not that different from what West and East Germans went through some years ago.

In reality we were at the entrance of Springer, publishers of Welt.de, one of the largest newspaper in Germany.

As security demands we had to show our passport, pass through the electronic checkpoint, switched off our phones and avail our selves for a thorough body check and compare to the entrance of our various media houses way back home we were completely at lost.

“Gosh are we at the airport?” said Farhad, a colleague from Afghanistan.

In the end we were made to understand that we had to go through that tight security check because of the sensitive stories published by the paper and there have been instances where some of the Editors have been attacked in the building.

As young journalists with sharp memory and very vigilant in relation to what we observed at Springer, our expectation at the German Bundestag security checkpoint was quite very high but that was rather normal.

We were only identified as true participants of the iij Summer Academy and we had a life time opportunity to chart with one of the youngest but brilliant members of the Bundestag.

Mr. Niels Annen, who is a member of the SPD, told us how as a politician he has been dealing with the press without any confrontation.

According to him trust does not always exist between the politician and the media. He said “ even when am talking off record I speak as if am on record because you may never know the true intentions of the press”

Mr. Annen also corrected the distorted fact among our colleagues that Germany has the Freedom of Information Act. He insisted that the Bundestag has not passed any freedom of information act but rather there is freedom for the press whereby the media can have access to the right information to enhance their reportage.

As to why such an important Act for the media has not been passed, Mr. Annen simply made it clear that it could lead to more transparency in the administration of the sitting government.

At the Bundespressekonferenz, we really felt strangers in someone’s country. We sat through the conference as observers, we could not ask any question and worse of all we could not understand the deustch the various spokespersons from the ministries were speaking.

Even though our moderators tried to write the topics and the questions being posed by the journalists in English on pieces of paper for us, we could confirm from the faces of our colleagues that the understanding was simply not there.

Thanks to Angela Wefels, the moderator of the conference, who explained the reasons behind the Bundespressekonferenz and what the spokespersons where talking about just after the conference.

Our visit to the Bundestag will never be forgotten since we have gain more insight information than we even expected.