Spiegel, ZEIT and Süddeutsche, especially their online editions aren't good recommendations for someone asking for news free of political agenda. During the last decade they have become very left-leaning, which is a sad development. I occasionally pick up a print copy of Zeit and Spiegel and these seem to be fine, but e.g. Der Spiegel also put Trump decapitating the Statue of Liberty on their cover (just inappropriate). I've never understood the good reputation of Süddeutsche, they are just doing very shallow reporting.
FAZ und NZZ are mostly neutral, slightly conservative (but not in the US sense). I'd recommend them.
Spiegel went from investigative journalism decades ago to publishing very shallow and (in case of its online version) click-baity articles. Süddeutsche is certainly more insightful.
But at least it is safe to say that Spiegel is not much politically biased on a whole.
Read the DPA newsticker if you really just want "Merkel said X", "Train accident in Y", etc.
Spiegel, ZEIT, sueddeutsche, Tagesschau, and FAZ are the large, reputable, online publishers. If you want to watch, tagesthemen is I believe among the best-produced daily news in both German and English language.
Spiegel (the magazine) is distinct from Spiegel Online, and is only available for paying customers. Do read through one–I'm sure there's a free trial or a pdf you can find somewhere. It's mostly medium-length and some long-form, deeply reported stories, current events none-withstanding.
All of these are essentially mainstream, politically, with FAZ tending centre-right, tagesschau going to great length to appear neutral, and the rest being centre-left, somewhere right of The Guardian, left of The Economist.
To be honest, I was quite surprised because I heard that Der Spiegel has an „extraordinary reputation“ in the U.S. for the first time today on HN.
I am German and even when I went to school (before the „life-sucking Internet“ from a comment below) there was the saying that all you could trust in Der Spiegel are the dates and numbers (although this article suggests even that might be too much).
IMHO, there are much better German-language news sources out there (Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Brand Eins, to name just a few with differing political leanings).
I read the guardian but it's pretty biased l and sometimes the reporting is terrible. It tends to align with my views but it's still super flawed. Recently I've also been reading dw.com Deutsche Welle. They are more straight factual and of course biased to German related news which is interesting.
Since I am trying to not let my German become too rusty, what would you recommend as a German news source that is somewhat free of a political agenda, so not leaning to the right or to the left too much?
Ideally just news, or news in context but no unbalanced editorials, opinion pieces or political or social agenda. It is the last one I am struggling with finding.
Also no cheap drama, preferably being positive in general.
I'd stay far away from the Spiegel. While it has the reputation of a liberal magazine it actually started off as the mouthpiece of the BND. For some weird reason it got that reputation when it attacked Adenauer's policies when he and de Gaulle were working on bringing Germany and France closer together. While it somehow has retained this intellectual status to a lot of people it is an outrageous publication, with much better marketing than it has content. It has also hired more and more leadership from tabloids.
I'd look into Swiss or French publications. Although most of the French media has also unfortunately been pretty streamlined.
Spiegel has become one of the worst propaganda magazines (not for the government, but for highest bidder) in Germany. It was once famous for investigative journalism, nowadays the most relevant question is who paid most for the article.
Sorry for this rant.
Still, occasionally you'll get a really good article. This is probably one of those.
As a German I also second that Bild is not a trustworthy source and I find it odd that such a charged information would be seeded to Bild instead of Spiegel, FAZ or Süddeutsche which all have a much higher reputation within Germany and internationally.
Funny though - I guess Bild is right about this anyway ...
Here's one that I personally find really interesting: Spiegel is one of the major German news magazines, and it has a small international section, where it takes the most important important, almost always long-form articles per day and translates them into English. As a result, it's both better than the German language Spiegel (which contains the usual fluff), and better than most English language publications (in curation, not sum of good content). It's EU focused, but maybe worth a gander:
As a German I have to say that Spiegel and spiegel.de aren't good journalism outlets and haven't been since many years ago. If I want well made journalism with actual investigative activities I'll resort to sueddeutsche.de, correctiv.org or nzz.ch.
Remember the Schulz-train "phenomenon" suddenly emerging last year? I stumbled upon it the first on spon and I am convinced they basically just invented it. And I am saying that as somebody voting for SPD.
Fact-checking isn't just about dates and numbers, but about all facts presented in an article.
As a German I'm also surprised about that reputation. The Spiegel is somewhere between a serious newspaper (like FAZ, Süddeutsche or Zeit) and a tabloid (like Bild). Hunting for great headlines and stories, but not necessarily concerned with objective news reporting.
FAZ und NZZ are mostly neutral, slightly conservative (but not in the US sense). I'd recommend them.
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