German publication asks: When should the media
report on murders committed by refugees? By Ann Corcoran, 8/29/18.
That
is a very interesting question. Short answer: Always!
However,
apparently the mainstream media in Germany has a really hard time with it!
German
media isn’t alone! The Left-leaning media here in the US has for the last
decade failed to report on some really horrible refugee crime stories I believe
out of willful blindness—reports of refugees committing violent crime simply
don’t fit their world view!
Just
the word refugee is supposed to make people melt with love and be more willing
to invite them in as neighbors!
Case in point! When
Esar Met, a Burmese Rohingya refugee, raped and murdered a little Christian
girl in Salt Lake City, only the major paper in Utah covered the horrific
details and long trial. The story never made it out of Utah.
(In
2014 Met was sentenced to life in prison, see here.)
Now here is The Local (Germany) with a
hand-wringing report on the question.
Do
we report the crime and fire up the xenophobes and racists? Or downplay the
crime so as not to interfere with the warm and fuzzy meme about refugees that
Mama Merkel and company are promoting?
When should the media report on murders by refugees?
Responsibly reporting on violent crime committed by refugees is one of
the hardest things for a news organization to get right. A national
broadcaster’s decision not to cover one such murder caused Jörg Luyken to take
a closer look.
Do newspapers focus too much on crimes committed by refugees, thus
creating an exaggerated public fear of the danger they pose? Or do they too
often ignore them out of a misplaced concern that they would be fueling racism?
Depending
on who you talk to in Germany, you will get very different opinions.
Left-wingers believe the press over-report, cynically exploiting the fact that
refugee crime sells newspapers. The
right meanwhile harangue the “politically correct” media for failing to inform
the public of a growing crime wave.
As
an editor who has to make calls on what does and doesn’t appear on our website,
I can say it is a mighty hard call.
I
am well aware of the fact that a horrific crime with an asylum seeker as the
suspect – such as the rape-murder of a teenage girl in Wiesbaden in June – will
bring readers to our website. In a time of declining advertising revenues, news
organizations face pressure to maximize their readership.
So
are we journalists pushing refugees under the bus to save our own skin? Have we
awoken a latent xenophobia in the general public that helps us sell newspapers
every time an asylum seeker commits a crime?
One German publication failed to mention
a horrific crime by a Somali asylum seeker (he allegedly knifed to death a
doctor in the presence of the doctor’s ten year old daughter) has earlier this
month and thus stirred the debate: Report or not to report? Notice how German
authorities hide even the face of the alleged murderer.
That
is certainly the conclusion to draw from a statement made by German public
broadcaster ARD earlier this month. ARD is publicly financed and therefore free
to cover the news without fear that low ratings will drive it into bankruptcy.
On August 16th, its Tagesschau evening news bulletin chose not to
mention a grim murder in the central German town of Offenbach. A doctor had
been stabbed to death in his practise that morning with no obvious explanation
for why. Hours later police arrested his
suspected murderer – an asylum seeker from Somalia who arrived in the country
in late 2015.
After
receiving complaints from the public for its decision not to cover the crime,
Tagesschau’s editor-in-chief Kai Gniffke publicly justified the decision.
Murders committed by refugees would only be relevant to the whole
country “if refugees are over-proportionally likely to be involved in
committing homicide,” he argued. “As far as we can tell from our research, this
isn’t the case – therefore we decided not to report on the crime.”
There
is a clear logic here: refugees are no more likely to murder than other members
of society, therefore any national media outlet that reports on murders by
refugees while ignoring other murders is giving the false impression that
refugees are more dangerous than Germans.
Looking at crime
figures
So is that it settled? Well, no. A closer look at the national
crime statistics shows that Mr. Gniffke’s conclusion is fairly wide of
the mark.
What
follows is a rather lengthy discussion of the numbers of murders
committed by refugees in Germany, and is very much worth reading.
Now here is the nub of why these violent crimes must be reported—-how
on earth do we know what policies and practices governments should follow (and
what mistakes were made!) to protect citizens if we hide from the truth!
In summary: refugees are more likely to be suspected of murder. The
most significant reason for this is because they are young and male. Choosing
not to cover these murders means one accepts the argument that the government
could not have done things differently in 2015; choosing to cover them is to
give a nod to the argument that they had different policy options. Continue reading The Local here.
And,
one more thing! Every time the Leftwing-dominated media buries a story like
Met’s or like that poor German doctor, it adds fuel to the fake news firestorm,
a fire you would think the media as a whole wants to put out.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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