The CBS Evening News began the new year with a January 1 report pegged to President Trump’s advocacy of wall across the southern border – to keep unauthorized people out of the U.S. – but CBS pivoted to comparing it to East Germany’s Berlin Wall put up to keep its citizens from escaping communism. “But do walls really work? Mark Phillips went to Berlin to find out.”
From the January 1, 2018 CBS Evening News:
ANCHOR JERICKA DUNCAN: President Trump has signaled he’s willing to extend protections for young immigrants brought into this country illegally, but on one condition. Last week he tweeted: “There can be no DACA without the desperately needed wall at the southern border.” But do walls really work? Mark Phillips went to Berlin to find out.
MARK PHILLIPS: If anybody knows anything about walls, it’s probably Hans-Peter Spitzner.
PHILLIPS TO SPTIZNER: So you would have approached Check Point Charlie.
SPITZNER: The first time Spitzner was at Check Point Charlie was when he and his daughter Peggy would be the last people to escape across the Berlin Wall before it fell.
SPITZNER: It was a great danger for us, and I thought a thousand things were in my head.
PHILLIPS: It’s the tourist attraction now, but from its building by the old East German regime in 1961, the wall was a death zone for almost three decades...
The Spitzners have strong views about walls, not just the Berlin example, now a living history lesson. Whether it’s here or the security barrier the Israelis have built between them and the Palestinians or going back to the Great Wall of China, they see all walls as monuments to political failure. The Berlin Wall, of course, was different than all the others. The others were designed to people out, and this one designed to keep them in. There is one thing they all have in common, though, critics will tell you that when governments build walls, it’s a sign that something else isn’t working.
PEGGY SPITZNER: It’s always to keep someone in, to keep someone out, to keep someone from doing something, so it’s always a bad thing really, and it’s always a monument of a problem.
PHILLIPS, OVER VIDEO OF PEOPLE IN 1989 USING PIX AXES ON BERLIN WALL: A monument that with a will can always be overcome.
HAN-PETER SPITZNER: I say never again, never again. Please.
PHILLIPS: Mark Phillips, CBS News, Berlin.
>> This video clipped to illustrate Paul Bedard's January 2 Mainstream Media Scream for the Washington Examiner <<