There is nothing new or profound in saying that both the left and right media are biased in different ways on different subjects and engage in partisan and ideological cherry-picking in their reporting. But sometimes the bias is so egregious that it is worth mentioning.
A June 11 newscast by DW News out of Berlin deserves the dishonor.
The newscast was about the riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland, over an Irishman being brutally stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant. The news anchor was a black man I had never seen in the anchor role in over two years of watching DW News.
The premise of the newscast was that troublemakers—labeled alternatively as “right-wing,” “far right,” and “right-wing extremists”—were behind the riots.
Those pejoratives need to be put into context. They are commonly used by DW News (and BBC News) to describe and denigrate people with views contrary to the prevailing politics in the newsroom. In that rarified air, the labels of “left-wing,” “far right,” and “left-wing extremists” are never used to describe people on the left.
That’s particularly odd given that there are communist parties in Europe, that half of Germany used to be Communist East Germany, and that some former East Germans still long for the life they had under Communist rule.
A guest on the newscast was a supposed expert on race, white supremacism, and discrimination against immigrants. The young woman spoke in progressive cant and agreed with the premise that white troublemakers were behind the riots. The source of her conclusion seemed to be comments on social media, including comments by Elon Musk.
No other possibilities were mentioned. According to the newsroom narrative—and the narrative in other European (and American) newsrooms about immigrant minorities—it couldn’t be possible that Sudanese immigrants were unwilling to assimilate to Western values and had therefore caused a grassroots backlash. After all, as the narrative goes, they were just trying to work and feed their families in the face of racism and xenophobia by the white majority.
The Northern Ireland government, like other Western governments, has bought into this narrative and takes sides accordingly. That leaves the Irish working class with no way to vent their frustration but to take to the streets.
Most residents of Sudan are Muslim, but there is a small minority of Christians. The newscast didn’t specify the religious breakdown of the Sudanese in Northern Ireland.
If most are Muslim, is it possible that they have different views than the native Irish on the treatment of women and LGBTQ, or that they prefer Sharia law over English common law, or that they have a high crime rate? No, according to the narrative, it is not possible.
Not only is it impossible, but it is racist and xenophobic to even think it is possible. Therefore, there was no need for the newscast to raise these questions and either refute or confirm such assumptions with statistics.
Likewise, it is racist to ask what the government was thinking by introducing large numbers of poor and poorly-educated emigrants from a dramatically different culture into Northern Ireland, where, after all, there is a legacy of Catholics and Protestants killing each other, contrary to the trope that diversity is always a strength.
Diversity is certainly not a strength in Sudan, where Arab Muslims have been massacring black farmers in what some rights groups have called a genocide. Are those Muslims right-wing extremists? White supremacists?
Why does this genocide get less media attention than what is claimed as genocide in Gaza? Does the media have a racial bias?
What label should be given to the anti-immigrant sentiments in South Africa, where native South Africans have rioted against the nation’s immigration policies and attacked emigrants from neighboring countries? Are they white supremacists? Or are they expressing their anger over high unemployment and having to compete for work against low-wage foreigners?
Given the paucity of news coverage on the situations in Sudan and South Africa, I don’t know the answers.
Likewise, I don’t know all of the facts, nuances, feelings and circumstances behind the riots in Belfast. And I’ll never learn them by watching DW News, where, in simplistic black-and-white thinking, all racial problems are the fault of right-wingers, the far right, right-wing extremists, and white supremacists.
Brainwash, rinse, repeat.
Mr. Cantoni is an author, activist and retired executive living in Tucson.