Charlie Kirk’s assassination has dominated headlines in Germany, but the coverage from state-funded broadcasters and prominent media personalities has been anything but neutral. Anchors and correspondents seized on the murder to push hostile portrayals of one of America’s most influential conservatives.
Their remarks in the German media, including false accusations made on public television, have sparked outrage in Germany, triggered formal complaints, and are now drawing the attention of U.S. officials.
Print Media Headlines: From Biased to Derogatory
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) ran the headline: “A targeted shot into the heart of the MAGA world,” with the subhead: “Charlie Kirk dies after being shot on a university campus in Utah. He tried to win young people over to Trump and racist ideas.”
The Berlin daily Tagesspiegel went further, bluntly labelling Kirk’s death: “Tod eines Brandstifters” – “Death of an arsonist.”
ZDF: Statements Without Substance
Dunja Hayali, host of the state-funded ZDF Heute Journal, told her audience on Thursday: “The fact that there are now groups celebrating his death cannot be justified by anything, not even his often abhorrent, racist, sexist, and misanthropic statements. But it seems that the radical religious conspiracy theorist struck a chord with precisely these views. Charlie Kirk not only had millions of followers on various platforms, his events were also extremely popular and well attended.”
Later, on the broadcaster’s official podcast, without providing evidence, Hayali doubled down, labelling Kirk’s positions “too radical, too racist, too misanthropic, misogynistic, and dehumanising.”
COLOGNE, GERMANY – SEPTEMBER 10: Dunja Hayali arrives for the annual German Television Awards (Deutscher Fernsehpreis) at MMC Studios on September 10, 2025 in Cologne, Germany. (Photo by Joshua Sammer/Getty Images)
That same evening, ZDF’s Washington correspondent Elmar Theveßen appeared on the primetime talk show Markus Lanz. Though he admitted he could not recall Kirk ever calling for violence, Theveßen painted him as a central driver of social division. Theveßen claimed Kirk had said homosexuals “should be stoned to death,” “women must submit to men,” and that “black pilots should be feared.”
Later that same day, Theveßen escalated further, targeting the Trump administration. On air, he described Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House, as a man “whose convictions are, to a certain extent, derived from the ideology of the Third Reich, and I say that quite deliberately.”
ZDF Walks Back, But Only Slightly
After a sharp backlash, ZDF acknowledged to Junge Freiheit that Theveßen’s claim about Kirk advocating stoning homosexuals was misleading. In reality, Kirk had cited an Old Testament passage during a discussion in June 2024.
The broadcaster conceded: “This context should have been made clearer. Elmar Theveßen regrets not having been more detailed at that point.”
HAMBURG, GERMANY – DECEMBER 11: Elmar Thevessen during the “Markus Lanz” TV show on December 11, 2019 in Hamburg, Germany. (Photo by Tristar Media/Getty Images)
Others outside of Germany who made this false assertion have also been forced to issue corrections and apologies, including horror writer Stephen King and former Tony Blair strategist Alastair Campbell.
German Online Discourse Pushes Back
Independent German outlets and online commentators erupted in outrage at the coverage. Many argued that celebrating or trivialising the assassination of a U.S. political figure crossed a red line, regardless of political disagreements.
Screenshots of the FAZ and Tagesspiegel headlines spread rapidly across X, where hashtags criticising “Staatsfunk” (state media) trended regionally. Conservative commentators accused ZDF of “dancing on a grave,” while even centrist accounts questioned why sweeping accusations of racism and sexism were made without evidence. Several groups have since filed formal complaints against ZDF and other outlets, citing violations of journalistic standards.
Backlash from inside Germany’s media
Criticism of ZDF has not only come from conservative outlets and social media users but also from inside Germany’s press establishment. Die Welt chief reporter Anna Schneider described the coverage as marked by “malice” and “inhumanity,” pointing in particular to young people on social media openly celebrating Kirk’s assassination.
“When someone is murdered, it should not matter what their political views are — it is always terrible,” Schneider said, warning that if society loses this basic consensus, “we are really talking about different conditions.”
She sharply criticised ZDF for the way its reporting framed the killing, often with what she called a “big but”: condemning celebrations of Kirk’s death while in the same breath labelling him “racist, sexist, misanthropic.” This, she argued, suggested to viewers that the victim was effectively a “monster” whose murder was less tragic.
Schneider also condemned ZDF correspondent Theveßen for spreading false claims about Kirk. “That is not true. It is disinformation,” she said, adding that she understood why many Germans were furious about being forced to fund public broadcasters through the GEZ fee while being served such distortions.
A Journalism Crisis Funded by the Public
At the heart of the outrage is Germany’s GEZ broadcasting fee — a compulsory charge of about €18 per month, billed to every household. The fee finances the country’s public broadcasters, including ARD (a consortium of regional networks) and ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, the second national channel). Germans must pay for it regardless of whether they ever watch state television or not.
What was once defended as a civic duty to support “independent journalism” is now widely criticised as a mandatory tax underwriting bias and misinformation.
The fallout from the Charlie Kirk coverage has only sharpened that anger. Critics argue the GEZ forces citizens to bankroll political propaganda rather than journalism, and campaigns to abolish or overhaul the fee are gaining momentum across Germany’s online forums, petitions, and editorials.
U.S. Diplomats and Officials Respond:
The controversy has spilt over into U.S. politics and may result in diplomatic consequences. “The Visa Snatcher” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared in a strongly worded statement on X, that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination are “not welcome visitors” in the United States.
He said he was “disgusted” by examples of social media posts that praised, rationalised, or made light of the killing, and has instructed U.S. consular officials to take appropriate action.
His post quickly filled with screenshots of German commentators, including ZDF correspondent Elmar Theveßen, often shared not just by U.S. users, but also by Germans flagging their own media figures. Landau punctuated the exchange with a meme showing the State Department seal projected like a Bat-Signal, captioned “El Quitavisas (The Visa Snatcher)”.
Grenell: German Media Has Become the “Radical Left”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany under President Trump’s first administration, Richard Grenell, added his own criticism on X: “I have so many friends in Germany. I LOVED my time there. I continue to believe that the majority of Germans are not as far left as the German media.
“In fact, I believe the majority of Germans are conservative, pro-family Westerners who believe in capitalism more than socialism. But the German media is radical Left. They don’t represent the majority of Germans.”
Grenell warned that, like in the U.S., there will come a moment when politicians seize on the disconnect between media elites and ordinary citizens: “The media in Germany are ruining Germany. The people must reject their narratives and speak up. Now.”
In a later post, Grenell went further, directly calling for Theveßen’s visa to be revoked. “This radical Lefty German keeps calling for violence against people he politically disagrees with. He poses as a journalist in Washington, DC. His visa should be revoked. There is no place in America for this type of inciter,” Grenell wrote, sharing the footage of Theveßen likening Trump aide Stephen Miller’s convictions to the “ideology of the Third Reich.”
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