Offenburg Attack and News Reporting

In the last week, this story unfolded: A German doctor got stabbed to death in his office, in Offenburg (SW Germany).  Cops say (at least so far), this was totally a random  act.....unprovoked.   The attacker?  Twenty-six year old Somali immigrant.  Attack also took place on the assistant of the doctor.  The attacker fled the scene, and a city-wide hunt took place (at least 20 police units), and eventually, they found the Somalia guy.  Based on the news reported via Deutsche Welle, there's probably enough evidence to convict the guy, but I would imagine some mental eval will occur, and he's declared either 'nuts', or was on some type of drug-binge. 

So here's the odd part of this story.  You can find bits of the story easily within the Offenburg regional newspapers.  You can find the story with the Deutsche Welle folks, but typically it's ONLY non-Germans that read it.  Then, that's it.  ZDF or ARD?  No.

Why not the German public TV folks?  Well....this got fairly criticized there on Friday by a number of folks, and the media-observer for ARD stood up and wrote a short forty-line piece to explain that public TV does not report each and every murder in Germany.   The fact that it was an immigrant attacker?  Again, no real reason to report it. 

I went looked at the comments under the defense of no story.  Around fifty-percent of the commentary are supportive of the non-story angle told by the media-observer and agree with the effort here.  The rest?  They go at the non-story angle in various ways.

The problem I see is that Germans are more or less convinced that if a story was not reported, then it didn't happen. I know....it's rather naive, but that's the character of Germans existing.  If ARD and ZDF (their trusted public networks) don't report it....it just never happened.

Another issue is that they can explain that it was one attack, with just one dead individual and one injured individual......while if this had been an attack on sixteen people (with several dead)....they would have been more or less....forced into reporting it (my humble opinion). 

One of the commentary notes even went as far as suggesting that the ARD news staff have progressed to the level of RT-Deutschland (referring to the Russian news device which is widely deemed by ARD to be a propaganda unit than a real news group).  One can be amused by the commentary, but it's full-scale blast at ARD news team.

All of this leads back to the accusations of censorship, and probably makes Germans less trusting of the public news 'control'.  Whether they like the suggestion or not.....they are making the case for AfD to exist as a counter-weight. 

I should point out that neither ARD or ZDF reported on the African stabbing of a German on the streets of Mainz from three months ago.  In that episode, the attacker simply picked someone at random, and slashed the guy with a knife.  The German guy survived, and the search still continues on today (no, they haven't found the attacker).  You can find reporting only via local news.