By John Miller
04/20/2024
See also: We Are All Germans Now
National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher has just announced that “reverence for truth” is a “distraction” [Hotseat heats up for NPR CEO Katherine Maher — and her life is the ultimate woke-elite bingo card , by Dana Kennedy, NY Post, April 18, 2024]. As a member of the Germanosphere, familiar with the lying self-hatred the German people have been taught since May 1945 because of You Know Who, this does not surprise me.
But, as jaded as I am, my first reading of the German Press Code was eye-opening. The revised code of 2017 expects that the German media lie by omission when reporting crimes committed by minorities, Muslims, or both. In other words, Germany’s communist Mainstream Media mirrors the MSM in the U.S. Peddling lies, not the truth, is their mission. Dishonesty is their stock in trade.
Die Gewalt nimmt zu und Ausländer sind überproportional daran beteiligt. Doch in den staatlichen Pressemitteilungen spiegelt sich dies nicht wider. NIUS zeigt anhand von zwei Beispielen, wie von der Zunahme der Sexualdelikte seit 2015 abgelenkt wird.https://t.co/Vw4UDvtKFx pic.twitter.com/YsTfke0XnN
— NIUS (@niusde_) March 22, 2024
Section 12 of the code is about “discrimination,” and sounds an awful lot like a law, but alas, it’s simply a rule from the German Press Council, the German MSM’s self-regulatory body. The council checks the media’s compliance to its lengthy 16-part ethics code, first published in 1973.
“There must be no discrimination against a person because of his/her sex, a disability or his membership of an ethnic, religious, social or national group,” the code warns. As in the United States, in Germany the worst possible crime one can commit is “discrimination,” and in the case of the press that means “Noticing” unpleasant facts about crimes and their perpetrators.
Thus did the council conceive Section 12.1, which banned mentioning race and religion in public-safety reporting unless a reporter could justify it:
When reporting crimes, it is not permissible to refer to the suspect’s religious, ethnic or other minority membership, unless this information can be justified as being relevant to the reader’s understanding of the incident. In particular, it must be borne in mind that such references could stir up prejudices against minorities.
[German Press Code, German Press Council, 2007]
The section grew out of concern that German newspapers were noticing how many crimes were committed by black American GIs.
“Guideline 12.1 goes back to a suggestion from the Association of German-American Clubs in 1971,” retired journalism professor Horst Pöttker wrote for Die Welt 11 years ago:
The Press Council’s yearbooks from that time show that the aim of the regulation was “to refrain from reporting on incidents involving US soldiers, mentioning the racial affiliation of those involved without any necessarily relevant reason.“
[Stop Self-Censorship, October 2, 2013]
Pöttker did not think calling a Muslim rapist a “Muslim rapist” is discriminatory, and further, with bracing honesty, wrote that “the rigid wording ban relieves journalists from thinking about possible causes of problems that could have to do with a perpetrator’s group affiliation.”
Pöttker also noted the obvious, citing the case of a Dutch soccer player beaten to death in 2012 by Moroccans, whom the German press refused to identity because of 12.1: The public knows the race of the perpetrator when the media refuse to identify him:
Studies show that readers notice when the nationality of a perpetrator is deliberately omitted. This leads to a loss of trust, which can be exploited by those who actually discriminate.
Journalism professor Pöttker noted that “right-wing blogs” jumped on the press for protecting the “noble Mohammedans.”
Things changed a little when the council altered that codicil after the mass rapes in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015.
When reporting on crimes, care must be taken to ensure that mentioning the suspects or perpetrators’ affiliation with ethnic, religious or other minorities does not lead to a discriminatory generalization of individual misconduct. As a rule, affiliation should not be mentioned unless there is a justified public interest. It should be particularly noted that the mention could fuel prejudices against minorities.
[German Press Code, German Press Council, 2017]
But Pöttker’s critique is still valid. The upshot of 12.1 is this: We don’t report race because foreigners, minorities and/or Muslims commit most of the crimes in this country, and we don’t want real Germans to get the wrong ideas.
And though the wording appears to have been liberalized in 2017, Section 12.1 remains a self-imposed gag order for all intents and purposes, one of many across Europe.
Consider these recent reprimands from the press council’s Complaints Committee, revealed in a search of its database:
Some good news…Just as Americans can turn to VDARE.com, American Renaissance, and other Dissident Right websites for the truth about the link between immigrants and crime, Germans have the NIUS website. It bills itself the “voice of the German majority,” which answered a NIUS survey with these three sentiments:
Call it the website of the Historic German Nation — cf. Historic American Nation.
NIUS recently published news that neither German authorities nor the communist MSM want Germans to know: More foreigners means more crime, in particular, sex and knife crime.
“Police crime statistics show a trend: violence is increasing and foreigners are disproportionately involved,” the website’s Felix Perrefort disclosed:
But this is not reflected in the press releases from the police and state governments. NIUS uses two examples — Hamburg and Saxony — to show how the frightening increase in sexual crimes since 2015 is being [hidden].
[Cover-up math for foreign crime: This is how the authorities calculate the numbers, March 22, 2024]
Sex crimes in Hamburg have doubled in the last eight or nine years, and sex crimes in Saxony have tripled. But the authorities and their MSM lapdogs don’t want anyone to know why.
Knife crime is also rising, Perrefort reported:
According to recently published crime statistics, knife crime has increased in Hanover. The development follows a dramatic trend lasting several years. Compared to 2021, the number of suspects in knife attacks has increased by 29 percent, but the population has grown comparatively slowly by 1 percent over the same period. The proportion of foreign suspects remained constant at almost 50 percent.
For the past three years, knife crime in Hanover has been increasing much more than one would expect given the significantly lower population growth. That means: it increases disproportionately. In 2021, … Hanover had 543,247 inhabitants, in 2023 there were 546,500: an increase of only 1 percent. While the population size has remained relatively constant, the number of suspects in knife attacks has increased massively: by a whopping 29 percent. It climbed from 452 in 2021 to 571 in 2022. From there it increased again to 584 in 2023. …
2021: 214 non-Germans out of 452 suspects in total = 47 percent
2022: 264 non-Germans out of 571 suspects in total = 46 percent
2023: 282 non-Germans out of 584 suspects in total = 48 percent
It’s not just knife attacks that have increased. The number of [sex] crimes … increased by 27.6 percent compared to the previous year. The general term violent crime, which includes sexual assault, but also murder and manslaughter, saw an increase of 14 percent.
[Crime figures in Hanover: Almost half of the knife suspects are foreigners, March 19, 2024]
Like the communist MSM in America, the communist MSM in Germany is, at the end of the day, fundamentally dishonest.
But, as the inheritors of the Western Civilization, whites are obliged to report the truth. Truth, rather than mystagoguery, is their defining characteristic — hence the Enlightenment and hence the development of the Scientific Method.
That means full disclosure with nothing hidden nor omitted. But in lying by omission, by hiding the truth about minorities and crime, the MSM sets an example: dishonesty is acceptable, respectable, and even required.
That has not only led to the twisting and manipulation of facts in other areas, such as the MSM’s flat-out lie about Donald Trump’s recent “bloodbath” speech, but also to the creation of “Hate Speech” laws, for example the trouble in which German-based American writer C.J. Hopkins finds himself [The Verdict, by C.J. Hopkins, Substack, January 24, 2024].
We can only hope that the Totalitarian speech codes that are rolling out across the West, as Hopkins worries, don’t terminally crush the freedom to speak the truth.
That is why I support VDARE.com.
John Miller operates 4Honesty.com, Sincerity.net, and other websites dedicated to exposing the truths that the MSM tries to hide.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.