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Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim is an award-winning science journalist. ©Sven Hoppe/dpa
A video by science journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim raised a conundrum: does she want to get involved in politics? The clear answer: no. There is much more to her statement.
Berlin – Science journalist and presenter Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim ended her video statement with the suggestion of political involvement as an experiment against populism. In a YouTube video a few days ago, Nguyen-Kim (36) gave the impression that she might become politically active. Now she said in the new edition of her program ZDFneo: “I’m not going to enter politics.” She wanted to sincerely apologize for the calculated ambivalence of her words.
The dissolution (in advance in the ZDF media library; linear at 10:15 pm) took place at night: The whole thing was an experiment within the framework of the ZDFneo program “Maithink X – The Show”. At the beginning of the new season, one edition of the program is about populism – title: “How populist politicians are screwing us”.
Nguyen-Kim clearly shows the rhetorical tricks used by populists, including the false dilemma argument, the so-called ad hominem argument, and the straw man argument. In the end, she says that she also used some of these typical rhetorical figures, which often come from the right, in her video and wanted to show how susceptible “we all are” to populism.
For example, in the video that was covered by many media outlets, Nguyen-Kim said: “I am worried about the future of our country and I am no longer just looking at it.”
In the nearly nine-minute clip, Nguyen-Kim also said that you can't do politics with science alone, but sometimes it's not a bad idea to “shake up an impasse with an outsider's perspective.”
Award-winning science journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim became best known for her YouTube channel “maiLab,” where she concisely explained scientific topics to laypeople. dpa