Thread by @jonworth

After all the fuss in the UK press earlier this week that some European countries were somehow punishing the UK vaccine, I decided to take a look at how German public broadcaster ARD frames this on the website of its news programme Tagesschau tagesschau.de

🧵 1/10

For non-Germans: Tagesschau is the evening news on ARD, one of the two national public broadcasting TV channels. Its website is the place you go for a quick but bland overview of what's going on in the news. Something like the BBC News website

2/10

Separating out all the search terms is a bit tricky, but here is a rudimentary effort

AstraZeneca - 679 results
tagesschau.de/suche2.html?qu…

Oxford - 190 results, of which fewer than 20 during pandemic
tagesschau.de/search/?search…

3/10

And then where it gets a little harder (grammatically too)... combining terms

britischer impfstoff - 22
tagesschau.de/suche2.html?qu…

britisch impfstoff - 93
tagesschau.de/suche2.html?qu…

britische impfstoff - 233
tagesschau.de/suche2.html?qu…

4/10

If you then start to look at the individual results, a sort of pattern becomes clear

Most of the time the AstraZeneca vaccine is simply referred to as that, no qualification added

With a qualification its the British-Swedish Producer AstraZeneca

5/10

And then there are a slew of stories that make international comparisons about vaccine strategies, some of them mentioning Britain, and *also* mentioning AstraZeneca - like this for example - that I can't separate out from the results

tagesschau.de/ausland/europa…

6/10

And please, before you make a tech point - why am I not searching for terms with "" around them - yes, I have done that, but because of the way Tagesschau's search works you get... the same results as when searching without ""

7/10

There is also the German grammar point - depending where in the sentence the adjective is, and how the sentence is formulated, it could be britischer britisch britische or britischen used

8/10

The conclusions?

The AstraZeneca vaccine is most often referred to just as that. Its development in Oxford is scarcely mentioned

That AZ is a UK-Swedish company is sometimes added as a qualification, but not always

That it's described as a British vaccine is rarer still

9/10

Sure, this isn't a comprehensive study. Other media outlets might phrase it differently. This might not reflect public opinion

But this doesn't look like an effort to slate the vaccine because it's British to me

Brits, it's not always about you

10/10

P.S. Please don't reply to this about the validity or not of pausing vaccinations with AZ. I am not placed to judge the merits of that. That's not the point of the thread. My point is simply on the communication in the German media.