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Watching Germany's top political talkshow @AnneWillTalk, I don't think I've ever seen a bigger gap between UK and German coverage (focus, angle, talking points) of a subject of common relevance. Including Brexit.
The UK debate is now overwhelmingly focused on vaccines. Here vaccines are still being treated as just one of several Covid topics, and with much less urgency. Similar story on @maybritillner (another top German politics talkshow) on Thursday and in daily papers.
25 minutes into the biggest German politics show of the week and vaccines have barely been mentioned at all. Main focus on ins and outs of lockdown policies. It's quite astonishing and *universes* away from the current UK debate.
To be fair @maybritillner did talk about vaccines and the UK success. Though to general approval on the politically diverse panel that success was treated largely as a product of eccentric British traits vastly overshadowed by the Johnson government's wider failures.
(30 mins into @AnneWillTalk and we're still on lockdowns.)
Handelsblatt, AstraZeneca, Article 16 - dramatic, epochal stories in the UK media, which seems to assume that they must be similarly prominent on the continent. Yet from my reading / watching none of them have been covered as more than everyday stories by most of EU media.
(45 mins in and @AnneWillTalk has started its vaccines segment).
This is all meant more as an observation than a judgment. But that said... it does seem remarkable, and not in a good way, that vaccines have middling salience in the current political debate here.
Still, now that @AnneWillTalk is tackling vaccines the discussion is serious, grown-up and mercifully free of the hysterical jingoism that has accompanied *some* of the coverage in UK. @annewill firmly pressing economy minister @peteraltmaier on vaccine production failures.
All of confirms my basic attitude which is that Covid is a remarkable revealer of national strengths and weaknesses. Germany: good at calm, consensus-based, gradual tasks (making cars, test and trace). UK: great at hectic, top-down, fast-changing tasks (finance, vaccines).
...and with media to match. German media can be too staid but is good at reflective, informed discussion that avoids shallow tribalism. UK media can be sensationalist and tribal but is good at adversarial exchanges that expose differences fast and clearly.
Very much a case in point: @AnneWillTalk tonight was followed, on Germany's most-watched TV channel, by a documentary from Nottingham on Sleaford Mods and punk in post-Brexit Britain. Imagine BBC One following Question Time with a documentary on Die Toten Hosen...
