April 19, 2021

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.”

When the riots were happening in Los Angeles last year, Congregation Beth Israel was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti. For Carolyn Siegel, this event was a tipping point. It was the fifth or sixth anti-Semitic incident she’d heard about in the past year, and she had enough.

Siegel remembered what her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, made her promise when she was eight years old: that her generation would not forget the Holocaust. “It hit me in that moment that I had to do something,” she said.

She came up with idea of recording Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren telling their grandparents’ stories. Although Steven Spielberg had already recorded many survivors through his more than 3,000 USC Shoah Foundation interviews, Siegel wanted to make something that would be more accessible to people in her generation, who may not have the attention span to sit down and watch these long-form films.

“I feel very grateful that Spielberg captured those survivors’ stories,” Siegel said. “But now, it’s 30 years later, and the world is starting to forget. Something had to be done so that these stories would resonate for today.”

“Something had to be done so that these stories would resonate for today.”

She added, “Maybe if you hear my story and the interviews I captured in the shorter form, you’d be interested to watch a longer one from the survivors themselves.”

Even though Siegel had no prior filmmaking experience, the LA native and Milken Community High School alumna set out making the short films. She asked on social media if anyone wanted to participate and received over 12 responses within 24 hours. Two participants are Siegel’s friends and former co-counselors from Camp Alonim.

To capture everyone’s stories, she filmed 15 interviews remotely between December of 2020 and this past March, releasing them on April 7, the day before Yom HaShoah. Each of them is around 15 to 30 minutes long. The project, titled “If You Heard What I Heard,” can be found on Siegel’s dedicated project website. Clips from it are on the project’s Instagram as well.

In her own recording, Siegel talks about her grandfather, Moses Locker, who joined the Polish Army to avoid Nazi persecution. He lost his entire immediate family in the Holocaust and ended up meeting Siegel’s grandmother, Leah, in a displaced persons camp in Germany. From there, they emigrated to the United States and rebuilt their lives.

“While the stories captured in these interviews, including my own, are difficult stories of loss and destruction, what those watching will also hear are stories of hope, resilience and strength,” said Siegel.

Kylie Ora Lobell is a writer for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Aish, and Chabad.org and the author of the first children’s book for the children of Jewish converts, “Jewish Just Like You.”