The Austrian Ministry of the Interior issued recommendations for the police. Firstly, the police should cut down on cooperation with those newspapers, which unfairly inform readers about the security authorities. Secondly, the police should publish the nationality and residence status of criminal suspects.
The response to these instructions focused primarily on the first point. However, the second point will have more fundamental power and political consequences.
The previous Vienna government adopted a resolution to publish information on nationality, religion or skin color of criminals only if necessary. At that time, there ruled a coalition in Austria which opened borders to migrants just as Germany did. That is why the two conservative parties ÖVP and FPÖ won the last elections.
The new government is making a new information policy, and the so-called liberal media is doing as if the state was commanding them what to write.
The same so-called liberal media, who do not want to give any details about (sex) crimes, is these days reporting in disgusting detail about alleged actions of Brett Kavanaugh, Trump´s candidate for Supreme Court, at student parties thirty years ago.
Austrian journalists cry out that the government is threatening the freedom of speech. In reality, however, they do not like the idea that people who do not believe in their information cocktail will be able to learn more from the police.
And so the media have extensively reported that Sebastian Kurz rejected the recommendations of the Interior Ministry. The truth is, however, that Kurz criticized only the first recommendation concerning the relations of the Interior Ministry with unilaterally informing newspapers. He did not comment on the second and more substantial recommendation on publishing the origin and religion of criminals.
