Trusting the Day’s News

Here’s a fairly recent anecdote about how Germans regard their media: On New Year’s Eve, 2015, 2,000 immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, many of whom were asylum seekers, sexually assaulted 1,200 German women of European origin. It happened in cities all across the country.

You may recall that Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was the primary European patron with policies to welcome fleeing Syrian refugees, along with other Arabs seeking a better life. She made the case that, morally, Germany had no other choice. Many Germans, however, were not as sure. Other nations, such as Poland, took in virtually no one.

This incident was spectacularly bad timing for Merkel. She invested all of her political capital in this humanitarian initiative. Now she was hearing that the male suspects felt no special kinship with Germany, and that marauding sexual assaults were not uncommon in their host countries. One Imam from Cologne suggested that one possible explanation was that the women were half-naked and wearing, well, cologne.

Meanwhile, Merkel didn’t want to change her policies, and the mainstream press was equally in favor of open borders for Syrian refugees. So, the story went underreported, or misreported — that the New Year’s festivities were mostly “peaceful,” the word “rape” went unmentioned and the ethnic profiles of the male suspects were unknown.

It wasn’t until April that the press finally decided to do some serious reporting on the ordeal these 1,200 German women experienced. The German public never forgave the press. Nor should they have.

There’s an object lesson here for American media. Reporting the news accurately is an obligation, even if it undermines the policies that the media is rooting for. Our Founding Fathers were especially ardent about freedom of the press. The public can’t very well exercise their freedom of speech if they have no knowledge about the actual events of the day.

Reporting the news accurately is an obligation, even if it undermines the policies that the media is rooting for.

It is an essential task that can’t be performed if the press has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the executive branch. President Joe Biden, so far, has every reason to believe that the Fourth Estate is just another one of his houses — this one providing a very important homecourt advantage.

Fox and Newsmax is mostly covering the southern border crisis, but CNN and MSNBC have shown little interest in the border, and, like President Biden, have no plans calling it a crisis. Instead, they are focused on the Derek Chauvin trial, but not so much on the renewed protests and violence coming from Minneapolis, all due to yet another police shooting of an African American. With closing arguments in the Chauvin trial set for Monday and Tuesday, everyone is worried about more rioting and vandalism around the country. The mainstream media, however, will mostly call it peaceful, no matter what it looks like on the ground.

We’ve seen this before, but it has never been this bad. President Barack Obama had a pretty easy time with the journalists who covered the White House. They admired him; some even loved him, and their reporting reflected more fawning and adoring than incisive and impairing.

Donald Trump invented the term “Fake News” precisely because he felt that the press was covering him unfairly. He wasn’t entirely wrong. The media was singularly focused on getting Trump out of the White House. All their instincts for objectivity went on a four-year hiatus. He deserved a lot of blame, for sure — picking fights, speaking cruelly, a sloppy caretaker of presidential dignity. But he was never given the benefit of the doubt, and his successes — record growth in median household income for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians before the pandemic; poverty declining to record low numbers for those same groups of Americans — never seemed to make the front page, or any page.

Meanwhile, Biden waited an eternity to schedule his first press conference. One White House correspondent from PBS made it known that he was perceived as a “moral, decent man.” Was that a question? Are press briefings now just a recitation of virtues? The Press Briefing Room at the White House is not for press agents, common hacks getting ready to write puff pieces; it is designated for credentialed overseers of the President of the United States.

The press are not partisans; they must be truth-tellers.

Meanwhile, no one seems interested in Hunter Biden’s associations with the Chinese at a time when China appears to have overtaken the United States as a superpower. He has a rap sheet that would impress a rapper, but apparently not the press.

There are things we want to know. Do we really still need to wear masks if fully vaccinated? What about indoor dining? How bad is it really at the southern border with abandoned children? Is China responsible for the coronavirus in nefarious ways? Yes, police shootings of unarmed Black males are very important, but so, too, is the far more murderous condition of Black-on-Black crime in inner cities. The murderer of Capitol Police Officer William Evans happens to have been a follower of rabid anti-Semite and homophobe Louis Farrakhan. Yet, the assailant’s motive and the teachings that influenced him aren’t considered newsworthy. What if, instead, he had been one of the Proud Boys, or an Oath Keeper, or a conspiracist with QAnon?

The biggest problems we face as a nation all stem from the same thing: We don’t trust our institutions. They have all failed us and never cease to surprise us. Scandals with the clergy. Cronyism and sexual indiscretion in politics. The self-interest of public school teachers, apparently, the most susceptible of all to COVID-19. Universities and private schools indoctrinating our children with Critical Race Theory that has but one purpose: to hate America and, if you’re white, to hate yourself.

The press now shapes stories rather than reports on them. They determine what is news, and the implications of yesterday’s news, all the while splashing yellow journalism a spectrum too far.

How this is all going to turn out is anyone’s guess. The world is throwing curve balls; the press is tossing soft balls; and the Biden administrations is loading the bases.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro College, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”