Media and migrants: How journalists help fuel populist momentum

Excerpt:

It’s a result that has given journalistic and political Berlin pause for thought: Germans are more concerned about old-age poverty and affordable housing than about migrants. At least that’s the finding of a recent Emnid poll for the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, which asked people to identify their two top concerns from a list of 20. Migration came in a distant 13th.

Even before last year’s national election, in which the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party took 12.6 percent of the vote, reporters fretted about the attention given to the populists and their main issue. “We report on this party as though they were a 40-percent one,” complained Lutz Kinkel, a former journalist for the popular magazine Stern, in a highly regarded documentary film.

I decided to do a self-check.

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