Olaf Scholz and the Right to Revise: A Journalistic Tradition or Problematic Antiquity?

Olaf Scholz, the leading contender to replace Angela Merkel as German Chancellor. Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

After 16 years of leadership, Angela Merkel is stepping down from her position as German Chancellor. The federal election on September 26th, 2021 demonstrated just how contentious German politics is at the current moment — not a single party won an effective governing mandate. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) earned the greatest percentage of the votes cast with 25.7%, followed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with 24.1%, the Greens with 14.8%, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) with 11.5%. Since no single party earned a majority of the vote, the SPD, Green, and FDP parties have openly begun talks to form a coalition government, with SPD candidate Olaf Scholz at the head of the new government. 

Olaf Scholz has a long history of involvement in the German government. He has held both state and federal offices, spanning from Minister of Labour and Social Affairs to Mayor of Hamburg. Scholz became a member of the SPD in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Hamburg, and represented the SPD as a member of the Bundestag, the German federal parliament, from 1998 to 2011. During this time he also served as SPD General Secretary from 2002 to 2004. Since March of 2018, Scholz has been Germany's finance minister and vice chancellor under the current two-party coalition government of the SPD and CDU parties. Needless to say, Scholz is not new to the pressures of holding high office, just one of which is countless interviews from the press.

In Germany, an established journalistic tradition called "the right to revise" limits true free press. Under this doctrine, the interviewee and their staff can authorize an article before publication. This practice, also known as interview authorization, exists almost exclusively in Germany. According to Hamburg Media School journalism professor Michael Haller, the tradition emerged in the late 1950s when interviews more so resembled brutal confrontations rather than civil conversations. Between the passionate shouts and attacking insults, it was difficult for journalists to decipher what had actually been said in the interview. Thus, interview authorization helped both interviewer and interviewee agree on what should be written in the paper at the end of the day. 

Legally, German copyright law extends the label of “co-author” to both the interviewer and the interviewee. Therefore, the interviewee’s consent for the piece to be published is equal to the interviewer’s consent. As a whole, the tradition of the right to revise was designed to provide interviewees with the opportunity to correct misunderstandings, and interviewers with the chance to create more cohesive, polished articles. However, the now outdated right to revise has been disastrously misused and manipulated to allow interviewees to entirely rewrite their answers, and consequently, history itself. 

During his time as General Secretary of the SPD, Scholz catastrophically abused the German right to revise. In 2003, Scholz was interviewed by Berlin’s Tageszeitung newspaper, a left-leaning cooperative German daily newspaper known for supporting the Green party and being critical of the SPD. The interview, performed by Tageszeitung’s Jens König, took place during the SPD party conference of 2003. König reported that Scholz “was very professional” until König approached him about authorizing the interview prior to publication. Scholz demanded massive changes and threatened to pull the entire piece if his “alterations” were not implemented. When König implied that the Tageszeitung newspaper would go ahead and publish the piece without Scholz’s authorization, Scholz threatened that the paper would be excluded from all future SPD background talks. The newspaper published the piece on November 28, 2003, with all of Scholz’s answers blacked out. 

According to the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband (DJV), or the German Association of Journalists, the authorization process begins when an interviewee requests authorization for an interview. This is important because it demonstrates that interview authorization is not written into law, and therefore journalists are not legally bound by the right to revise. If the interviewee requests to authorize the interview, they and their press team are only allowed to “ensure factual correctness, the preservation of meaning and linguistic clarity.” The interviewee has no right to change the questions in the interview, and changes that are made by the interviewee that contradict the authenticity of the interview can be rejected by the editorial team of the newspaper. If the interviewer and the interviewee cannot come to an amicable agreement on the edits, the newspaper has the right to refuse to publish the interview. Scholz abused the protections granted to him by the right to revise, revealing the dangerous implications of the dishonest practice. 

The right to revise directly contradicts one of the most basic and sacred duties of ethical journalism: to seek and report the truth. The right to revise allows influential politicians such as Scholz to distort the truth and reshape it into what will be best for their career rather than best for their country. In its current practice, the right to revise is neither fair nor honest, and it forces German journalists to hide information from the public that would otherwise be published. As stated in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, “the public is entitled to as much information as possible.” Interview authorization prevents journalists from truly holding those with power accountable — it prevents them from doing their jobs. 

Although most journalistic institutions in Germany, including the DJV and the German Press Council, have warned about the dangers of the right to revise, many people within German journalism still defend it. In an interview with Alles Über Interviews, Everything About Interviews, press lawyer Tanja Irion defended the right to revise, arguing that the practice is necessary to ensure that journalists truthfully report what has been said by the interviewee. She claimed that without proper interview authorization, journalists could easily manipulate interviewees’ language or misquote them to make the piece more convincing. Irion also maintained that the protections of the right to revise extend to journalists, because interview authorization allows journalists to be certain that they are allowed to publish their edited version of the interview. 

Additionally, the Federal Association of German Press Spokespersons goes so far as to argue that the right must be strengthened as a result of the fast pace of media in modern society. There is validity to these concerns — the pandemic caused a dramatic increase in media consumption around the world, resulting in an increased reliance on truthful reporting. However, these arguments are deeply flawed. The increase in the role of media in modern society, especially with the escalation of  “fake news” rhetoric, is cause for an increase in holding politicians and public figures accountable for what they say. When elected to office, officials have a duty to be transparent with the public, and journalists have a duty to be an avenue to do so. The dangers of the right to revise too often lead to decreased rather than increased transparency. 

Concerns with the right to revise have not quieted since Scholz’s interview. Examples like Gabor Steingart’s interview with the Journalist newspaper in 2019, in which Steingart withdrew an entire interview after the newspaper rejected his alterations, demonstrate just how disputed the issue remains. Bascha Mika, the editor-in-chief of the Tageszeitung newspaper from 1998 to July 2009, said it best in an article she released in response to Scholz’s catastrophic interview: the right to revise allows interviewees to perpetrate “fraud against the claim of a free press, fraud against the journalistic self-image, [and] fraud against the reader.” 

Scholz’s abuse of the right to revise signifies his general willingness to go back on his word. The implications of a leader like this, especially one without a governing mandate, would be cataclysmic Germany and every nation with which it trades, negotiates and collaborates. German journalists must set aside erroneous loyalty to the unethical institution of interview authorization, and Olaf Scholz must reckon with his past history with the right to revise if he is to fill the gaping hole that Angela Merkel is leaving in the German political sphere. The world relies on journalists and the press to report the full truth, not a polished or altered version of it to protect corruption. A world leader should not be able to go back on their word and recklessly rewrite history because the spoken word counts when it is said, not when it has been codified. 

Jesse Levine (BC ‘25) is a first-year student at Barnard College looking to study political science and human rights.