Our German correspondent Egri Nök sends these short observations of the shifts that are occurring in the German press in their coverage of culturally enriched violence and mayhem. Translations of the article mentioned at the end of her remarks (along with several others) will be published in due course.
“Are people from Northern Africa not allowed to celebrate the New Year, or what?”
— Ruth Kastner, Chairman of the Greens in Schleswig-Holstein, via the Kieler Nachrichten
Ignoring the Press Codex
by Egri Nök
If I were to describe what has changed in public (press) discussion from 2016 to 2017, this seems important to me:
All German publishers and journalists must adhere to the “Pressekodex”, a voluntary commitment. This commitment says they are not allowed to mention the national or ethnic background of criminals, unless it is absolutely unavoidable.
2016 saw an intense discussion, under the impact of Cologne and “refugee” criminality, about whether it was permissible under certain conditions not to adhere to this Codex. The codex remains unaltered to this day, however.
Nevertheless, police reports now often explicitly mention the nationality/ethnic background of perpetrators. Some newspapers have followed suit, ignoring the Press Codex, while for others the rule — “if there is no mention that the perpetrator is German, it means he is migrant” — still applies.
Over the last few days, the press began to outright ignore the Codex. Background and nationality are unashamedly discussed. It is as if a switch has been flipped. Decidedly left-leaning magazines such as Der Spiegel, leading politicians of the Greens, and a few of the Social Democrats are mortified.
If you look at this opinion piece from Die Welt, in the end it even admits that Islam has got a plan for the West. This would have been unthinkable just a year ago.
Too late, they are no longer believed or trusted and matters on the ground have now gone well beyond their ability to influence events in the next few years.
The momentum is driven by other forces now.
Their role in getting us to this point however will not be forgotten.
They also know it……..There will be a desperate scrabbling to curry favour…”look, we know your pain and support your efforts to change things”.
Too late. What a bloody tragic mess…..
Not all of them are the same. There are individual players, with individual interests at work. Some newspapers and some journalists are government mouthpieces, but not all.
Stefan Aust for example conclusively showed, as early as November 2015, in a mainstream paper like “Die Welt”, that the German government was in fact not surprised by the “refugee crisis”, as they said they were.
There is already some scrabbling to curry favour to be observed. Giovanni Di Lorenzo, chief editor of “Die Zeit”, lately apologized for his paper’s failure to report truthfully. They portrayed “refugees” as women and children, while they were in fact able-bodied young men. I think his apology was pure damage control. He was probably sorry they had to admit what they did, not sorry they did it.
I wonder how Frau Kastner would react if a slightly clumsy European middle-aged man misinterpreted the signs given off by a woman and made the gentlest of unwelcome approaches to her?
Come on Salome, get out of the realms of science fiction and fantasy. You know that’s NEVER going to ha ppen.
“Are people from Northern Africa not allowed to celebrate the New Year, or what?”
Ruth Kastner is an ignorant [epithet]: she has not heard/read what imams said about joining Kefirs in their celebrations -haram! haram! haram!
Well, that does depend on the North African definition of “to celebrate”.
If last year was any indicator, then, no, they are not.