ABSTRACT
As the major European destination country for refugees, Germany was at the forefront of the political and social response to it, with both Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door policy and the mass sexual assaults in Cologne during New Year's Eve celebrations encapsulating opposing discourses of humanitarian responses and the very real challenges of integration. This chapter, by a journalist for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's leading liberal daily newspaper, traces how news and public opinion changed after New Year's Eve 2015, when hundreds of women were attacked, robbed, and sexually harassed by groups of men, most reportedly migrants from North Africa. These events dramatically increased the distrust of a large part of the German public toward the news media. The fact that the incidents became public only gradually fueled hostility against broadcasters and the press (the “lying press,” as the extreme right put it). That led journalists to ask themselves how to report on the refugee crisis in this highly divisive political climate. Were they politically biased? Did they fail to write on migration-related problems they did not want to see? And how could they regain the trust of their readers?
