Photo: Freepik

Why make it easy when you can make it really easy? That’s the question that is asked every day in the online editorial team at RTL.

You probably knew that there is an English RTL with „RTL Today“ and a French RTL with „RTL Infos“ in this country. But did you know that RTL.lu not only publishes articles in Luxembourgish, but also in German? We have selected and linked a few news items for you:

RTL.lu in German, that sounds strange. A look at the author of the article reveals, however, that these are articles from „AFP“, the news agency „Agence France-Presse“. And the articles were directly pulled into the RTL site’s system and even put online. However, they were not linked on the site itself, and so these articles can only be found if you play with the article numbers in the URL. Or you can run a web crawler over the site and see all the articles from the past year listed in a table.

RTL’s „journalistic“ work processes

Around 55% of the articles that are in the RTL system and have also been published are those in which AFP is the author. However, these cannot be found on RTL itself, and this is because RTL’s editorial team then translates the articles they like and at the same time replaces the author „AFP“ with „RTL“ and thus labels the article as its own content. Of the articles that are actually linked and can be found on RTL.lu, only 15% are marked with the names of journalists and over 70% with the author „RTL“. Under „RTL“ not only the translated agency reports are published, but also all other copied content, for example police reports. This is against the rules of the press code, which stipulates that the author of the article must be identified, but what does RTL care about the press code? This is always a good way to hide how many articles were written by which editorial team - or sometimes even by IP employees.

The staff of the French-language RTL Infos still sometimes writes „RTL avec AFP“ there, but the complex journalistic work of translating was not done here either. The part of the editorial team that translates the articles into Luxembourgish therefore has more work to do. This has probably led to people becoming creative in order to produce as many articles as possible as quickly as possible without much effort. Let’s look at our examples.

Short, concise and sensational

From the list of agency reports stored in the system, the RTL „journalist“ selects one that seems important enough to be translated. However, these are not always AFP reports, sometimes other agencies also have their reports loaded into the system. In September, there are major floods in Libya. This is an event in which media houses around the world mainly rely on information provided to them by press agencies. The agencies themselves rely on many different sources, which they then cite in their articles. RTL has loaded over 50 AFP articles into its system, 13 of which are translated and appear on rtl.lu. To save even more work, they are not only translated, but also heavily abridged.

For example, RTL takes over the DPA’s report on the danger of a cholera outbreak in the flood zone. A large number of other press outlets also copy the DPA report, but unlike RTL, they do not just cite DPA as the source, but also take over the majority of the background information. RTL thought it would save space and time, reducing the DPA report to the sentence „International aid teams speak of a catastrophic humanitarian situation“ and translating the first three lines of the text:

„The Ministry of Health in Tripoli warned that, especially in the city of Darna, drinking water was contaminated with corpses, animal carcasses, waste and chemical substances. Dozens of children have already fallen ill. Drinking water has also been mixed with sewage.“

If you compare the translation with the original, you will notice that RTL has not only deleted a source reference, namely „Arab News“, within the text, but also apparently made too much of the description of the cholera disease in the translation:

„In Libya, after the severe floods, there are fears of a possible outbreak of the gastrointestinal disease cholera. According to the newspaper „Arab News“, the Ministry of Health in Tripoli warned of an infection with the dangerous bacteria. In the severely affected coastal city of Darna, groundwater has been polluted by corpses, animal carcasses, garbage and chemical substances, it was said. Dozens of children have fallen ill there from polluted water.“

So let’s note: RTL does not just copy press releases from other agencies, they also do not cite sources or original authors and in some cases they also delete information that simply takes up too much space between all the advertisements on the site. The point here is not to inform the population, but to have just enough so that people continue to come to the site every day and it has more audience for its continuous advertising.