M Hm! A popular answer from ARD journalist Caren Miosga in her talk show of the same name consists of these three letters. With “mhm” and “hm” Miosga wants to indicate to her viewers that she doesn’t really like what the person she’s talking to is saying.
Mhm or hmm are not arguments, but flirtatious. Coquetry and smugness are legitimate means of communication, including in talk shows, including with politicians from right-wing extremist parties. But they want to be well-dosed and the questions well-prepared.
Had this Sunday Miosga hosted AfD federal spokesman Tino Chrupalla. To his expected statement, “We need a stop to further illegal migrants (…) so that internal security can be restored,” Miosga’s response was: “Mhm.”
This was preceded by an exchange of blows over the question of whether the AfD was something like that the US immigration agency ICE also want in Germany. A legitimate question, but Miosga already asked it with a smug tone that suggested that any answer that wasn’t “no” wouldn’t please Miosga.
We now know what we knew before: Chrupalla thinks that illegal foreigners have to get out and that Germany is not threatened by Russia
The real issue is the now unquestioned correlation between illegal migration and internal security. Instead of attacking exactly this connection with numbers, the AfD man should be convicted, ICE-style shootings to accept what he would of course never say in this format.
“I’ll leave it like that for now.”
Exactly a year ago, the same presenter had the then AfD candidate for chancellor Alice Weidel as a guest. Back then, Miosga mumbled in similar situations or said, “I’ll leave it at that for now.” In the show a year ago, Alice Weidel’s eye-rolling caused outrage.
When asked about Holocaust Remembrance Day, she reacted in the same way, which was caught on camera, but denied it when asked by the moderator. Then Miosga finally had the chance, live, in color and in front of an audience of millions, to tell Alice Weidel to her face that she was lying. But Miosga said: “Oh, I just saw that.”
Instead of confronting Chrupalla with the fact that there are demonstrably Russian-controlled disinformation and hacker attacks, and that disposable agents are committing crimes here that are blamed on the Greens, Miosga wants to pin Chrupalla on the fact that the AfD is letting the Kremlin whisper it to them with 120 questions about NATO.
Yes, sure, mean. Caren Miosga can also counter better. Nevertheless: The debate about who is harmed and who benefits when the ÖRR invites the AfD to a conversation should not only be conducted based on those invited. The fact that AfD politicians are invited to talk shows and do come is not the problem. There they only say what they hand out at every voting booth from Magdeburg to Pforzheim along with free ballpoint pens.
What did the show bring?
The problem is that it’s not enough to ask leading questions (in the title of the show alone: ”Is Trump a role model for Germany, Mr. Chrupalla?”), or to try to convict the guest as a Nazi using terminology (you said guilt cult, that’s Nazi vocabulary. I didn’t. No. Yes. No. Yes) and using humming and humming as stylistic devices.
What did Sunday’s show bring? We now know what we knew before: Chrupalla thinks that illegal foreigners have to get out and that Germany is not threatened by Russia.
ÖRR talk shows are overrated. It is difficult to estimate their share in opinion formation compared to dubious and less dubious Internet channels. But a survey on this is revealing: In 2025, the AfD was in 2.8 percent of the talk shows on ARD and ZDF with a vote share of 24 percent in the Bundestag, i.e. significantly less than corresponds to its percentage of voters. The SPD, on the other hand, sat in 25.2 percent of the talk shows on ARD and ZDF with a vote share of 19.1 percent in the Bundestag.
And? Did it benefit her?