“We’re graphing something like a fever curve of society,” journalism professor Thomas Hesterman said of his new study. “Crime and Migration: Perceptions in the German Media,” Which examined how the nationality and ethnicity of crime suspects has been reported since 2007.
Hestermann’s team at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg compiled their 2025 findings for the Berlin-based media services integrationA research service for journalists focusing on migration, integration and asylum. The results published on Friday are worrying: “Foreign suspects are mentioned in police statistics almost three times more often than their share.”
Hesterman says the figure has never been this high, comparing it to 2014, when suspects’ nationality or ethnicity barely played a role in reporting.
A year later, nearly one million migrants arrived in Germany, about one-third of whom had fled the civil war in Syria, while a fifth came from Albania and Kosovo. Since then, Hestermann has observed “huge distortion” in the German media when it comes to crime and migration.
influence public opinion
Media coverage has consequences, Hesterman says, because it influences how people form their views about violent crime. They ask themselves: “How much danger am I really in? Who poses the danger?”
Hesterman’s study tried to answer similar questions: “How are perceptions of violence changing? How are views of suspects and their origins changing?”
He described the different reactions seen using the example of two attacks that took place in Munich and Mannheim in 2025: “Munich: A young Afghan man reportedly drove into the crowd, killing two people. Shortly afterwards in Mannheim: A German man also drove into the crowd, killing two people.”
Playing into the right wing populist agenda
And what happened in the media? Public broadcaster ARD broadcast a primetime report on the attack in Munich, but not on the attack in Mannheim. Overall, the study found a doubling of the number of reports on German TV and newspapers about crimes involving a foreign suspect.
Hesterman is familiar with such journalistic reactions from his own experiences as a reporter and presenter for public and private radio and TV stations. He says that decisions are often taken intuitively based on intuition. This often happens unconsciously, he said, a conclusion he has drawn based on his conversations in editorial offices.
Still, “many spontaneous decisions result in a pattern of reporting that follows a right-wing populist agenda,” he said.
‘The reporting is overall discriminatory’
Hesterman said left-wing journalists are often accused of only reporting positively on migration. But that’s not accurate, he said: “The overall reporting is discriminatory.”
They cited weekly media analyzes conducted between January and April 2025 as evidence on the topic of crime. During this period, 168 TV reports on violent crime in Germany involving 146 suspects were examined, as well as 330 newspaper articles involving 263 suspects.
Despite considerable variation in editorial orientation, from public and private TV stations to print and online texts, Hesterman found no significant differences.
“We found that the two newspapers are completely different [conservative] World And [left-leaning] Taj “The names of foreign suspects were specifically disclosed during the review period, if origin was an issue,” Hesterman said.
Criminologist and sociologist Gina Vollinger calls this media distortion the “migration” of crime. A professor at the University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration in North Rhine-Westphalia argued that this was due to an overemphasis on culture. “A category, in my opinion, used only when the perpetrators are non-Germans. Suddenly the question arises: ‘Does this have anything to do with culture?'”
Editorial diversity as a solution
Vollinger emphasized that the crime had nothing to do with Genesis. “This is not migration history. This is not passports or nationality,” he said. “Rather, it is certain risk factors that arise primarily from poverty, lack of prospects, and personal experiences of violence.” He said, when these factors are taken into account, one does not see any difference between people with or without a migration background.
How can this imbalance in reporting be corrected? Hesterman said that in his experience as a journalist, language barriers can often be a hindrance when reporting on migration.
“That’s why it’s important for editorial offices to become more diverse,” he said. “For youth growing up in different cultures to enrich editorial offices.”
This article was originally written in German.