"Looks like" is very much the right way of describing it - it's largely a matter of appearances. Especially since Brexit, a lot of the British media pushes only

"Looks like" is very much the right way of describing it - it's largely a matter of appearances. Especially since Brexit, a lot of the British media pushes only the downsides of any option the government chooses and only the upsides of the alternatives, whilst at the same time spinning everything other countries do as a success. For example, Germany's rail infrastructure has been having real problems actually running trains as a result of massive underinvestment (about a third of what the UK spends if I remember ightly) but our media makes it sounds like they're the ones with a better rail system due to actually investing. Or take Covid - our press pushed this tale about South Korea having such effective contact tracing they could lift restrictions and reopen society, whereas our incompetent government failed to do so, but in reality they were actually less successful at doing so and even had their own equivalent of Eat Out to Help Out planned that they completely failed to launch in 2020 because they couldn't keep restrictions lifted for long enough. It's just that the British press only reported on them attempting to lift restrictions as proof they succeeded and ignored the part where it kept on failingg and they were almost immediately reimposed, whilst their UK coverage only focused on failures and not on the country being largely out of lockdown for most of summer 2020. Also, the only zero-fraud option for something like furlough or business support is to deny everyone - every real-world set of anti-fraud checks inevitably blocks some genuine people and permits some fraudsters, I'm sure HN must be familiar with this concept by now, and of course the media attacked the government as incompetent for both. (For example, complaining that businesses couldn't just add people to payroll and immediately claim furlough for them - which would enable massive, trivial fraud - and also that they had no way of detecting if employers were making people come into work whilst claming they were furloughed.) Most of the publications pushing that story even spin normal benefit fraud as something that's not a big deal and right-wing Tory attempts to crack down on it as damaging and counterproductive using essentially this argument. On the other hand, Germany's financial regulator actually opened a criminal investigation into the journalists who investigated the Wirecard fraud, and Germany's own press and politicians failed so hard at investigating that it fell to journalists from outside the country working for the Financial Times to finally prove it. Those are, qualititively, very different kinds of fraud problems and not in a way that makes Germany look good.