In the early nineties, when I became a news junkie, I started read Spiegel, Newsweek, Time and The Economist. I quickly decided that Spiegel is best by a length (for example, when all others were still optimistic about the I/P peace process, they correctly predicted the course of Barak's future PM-ship even before he was elected party leader), and that the Economist is unbearable. From the time of the second Palestinian Intifada, I increasingly got fed up with the spin and hypocrisy in the two American magazines (something the American Left got a strong sense of only during the Bush era), which worsened during the 2000 elections, and I completely abadoned them in the run-up to the Iraq war. I was left with Spiegel.

However, Spiegel's quality declined strongly after the death of Rudolf Augstein. First there was their complete turn-around on Iraq, publishing excerpts from Kevin Pollack's book, which whitewashed twenty years of US Iraq policy and spun it in an anti-Iraq, anti-UN-inspectors way. Then some articles on asylants that sounded xenophobic. It also seemed that economy articles with a renegade view disappeared. And Henryk M. Broder had room for too many lame articles. But what drew the line for me was wind power. (Yeah, my pet issue.)

IIRC in late spring 2003, SPIEGEL ON-LINE had a great article summing up and debunking all the anti-wind-power spin VDEW, Clement & co began to put forth then. I was anixously waiting for the same article to appear in the paper version. To no avail. Instead, some half a year later, they brought a cover article - reproducing all the debunked spin and 'arguments'! It was a real hatchet job. (I later read one of the authors of the internet article quit SPIEGEL in response.) Their later endorsement for presidential candidate Köhler only underlined my notion. At this point, like you, I became an (almost-)internet-only news reader.

Now, I wonder whether what happened to the Spiegel is the takeover of a different team, or part of a general righward (and dumb-ward) lurch of the whole German media elite. At any rate, I sensed the latter too: jandsm, you say the SZ praises the 'reforms', but so did some articles and editorials I read in the taz!

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}