News Coverage of Refugee Crisis — Fueling the Right?
The words »refugee« and »crisis« covered at least one major article a day in every big newspaper ever since the “start” of the crisis in 2015. Not only for Germany and the EU in general, but also for the press, this incident is a state of emergency. How much should be covered by the press, should they comment on it or should the news coverage be strictly objective? Due to a study by an american University, there were more than 19.000 articles about the topic »refugees« in 2015. Well, it still is one of the most striking challenges of the EU, so an increased coverage of the media is not really suprising. However, the study did also reveal, that four out of five articles reported about it positively.
http://www.huffingtonpost.de/2016/08/09/fluchtlingskrise-medien-berichterstattung-_n_11400578.html
Within the articles, most of the media did somehow adapt Angela Merkel’s slogan “We can do this!”. With the population getting more and more critical of this refugee policy, the media did concentrate on portraying the positive effects of it or showing the refuegees as victims and rarely as perpetrators. The press has the duty to inform, there is no doubt about it. Within Germany there being so many right-wing groups such as the AFD or PEGIDA, it becomes obvious why certain newspapers try not to fuel hatred and xenophobia.
A very recent example of this is, the german Tagesschau, not reporting about the rape and murder of a young girl by a refugee. They did neither report the murder itself, nor the arrest of the young refugee, because they said that it was to “regional to cover”. Despite the many headlines around the world, they claimed that it was not different to other isolated murders. This, of course, provoked anger and accusations that the independent format Tagesschau would practise censorship. The fact that even the Washington Post wrote an article about it, shows that the justification of regionality is probably just an excuse. The murdered girl Maria was the daughter of a high-ranking EU official, which makes this tragic incident even more precarious.
What the Tagesschau was probably trying to avoid was fueling the hatred of right-wing groups.This, however, went terribly wrong. Now, groups as PEGIDA and AFD see their claims confirmed and call all news coverage of the refugee crisis a “Lügenpresse”.
I personally think that the Tagesschau should have covered the murder of this girl, despite of the given danger. In contrast to just leave out important information, it is essential to report broadly and this does include these kinds of informations. In contrast to just try to shape opinions by editing news, it would be a better way to take the time to really engage with a topic like this. We need to stop laughing at the stupid paroles of the right-wing parties and start to talk to the individuals. The election of Trump certainly showed us one thing, populism is not to be underestimated.
