Elisabeth Epple was born on 25th January 1932 in Steinbronnen, a small village near Bad Saulgau in the southwest of Germany. Born into a farming family, she was the youngest of six children. Just one year after her birth, the Nazis took over Germany under Hitler’s leadership. In 1938, when she was only six years old, World War II started, and she experienced seven years … Continue reading “With every airplane I prayed that our small village would be spared from the attacks”

Propaganda is more than ever present on social media today. We just don’t know it as posters hanging in the streets anymore. Nowadays, propaganda is mainly spread through the internet and social media. On apps where we spend an average of 2 hours and 29 minutes a day, according to the Dutch magazine Emerce. In a report of the European Union on free and pluralistic … Continue reading Personalised propaganda is common in this era

Dramatic events took place in Belarus in August 2020. Protests began to arise in the run-up to and during the 2020 presidential election. Two sound engineers who were collaborating on a concert recorded Viktor Tsoi’s Soviet protest song Change as a protest against injustice. Dzmitry Dzmitryjeu (43), a poet but also a former sound engineer of a Belarusian state institution, couldn’t resist reacting to this … Continue reading “In the morning they kill, in the afternoon they pass the law to make the murder legal’’

How was it to grow up under Ben Ali’s rule in Tunisia as a child? Ben Ali was elected president of Tunisia in 1987 and stayed in power until his escape from the country during the Arab Spring in 2011. Despite major progresses in the economy and the status of women, Ben Ali ruled Tunisia as a dictatorship using propaganda to control the population, as the journalist … Continue reading “Politics was taboo, we always felt watched”

Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Het Parool, Michiel Couzy, has over twenty years of experience as a journalist. He believes mainstream media is more important than ever, but at the same time, the behaviour towards journalists has changed. How has journalism as a profession changed since you started? It hasn’t happened to me, but there have been times when journalists have been attacked during work. Before, the … Continue reading Michiel Couzy: “This isn’t healthy criticism towards journalists anymore, it’s violence”

Journalist Daniel Völpel (43) from Stuttgart works in the fields of science, economics, and local politics. During his studies of history and political science, he already worked part-time for the local newspaper Böblinger Bote. Before he started his own business as a freelance journalist in 2009, he was employed by the Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung and the Schwarzwälder Bote. He has been working in the industry for … Continue reading “We have developed from the age of the word to the age of the (moving) image”

Eric Molenaar (61) is a news reporter and editor at the Noord-Hollands Dagblad. He has been working there for 43 years, when it was still named the Schager Courantand before the merger of several newspapers. He applied there for a journalism learning job and has never left after that. During his years as journalist, he has seen a significant change in the workload, but he … Continue reading “We have to set our own boundaries and guard them”

Gudr Al Ayouby (20) was born and raised in Curaçao and studies Creative Business at the HU in Utrecht. Since he was little, he has had a fascination for the news – political news to be specific. When he was just six years old, he watched the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. ‘I was watching this with my parents. They jokingly said: who … Continue reading ‘I have always been a political news junkie’