BBC World Service presenter Paul Henley (also known for Crossing Continents on Radio 4) has a piece in the BBC News magazine (apparently also a World Service From Our Own Correspondent talk) which the BBC News website home page headlines 'It pays to care'. It concerns German entrepreneurs helping migrants and refugees.
Paul doesn't hold back from showing his admiration for such people - or his approval of Germany's acceptance of over a million migrants.
Here's a flavour:
I've never met Angela Merkel - not for want of trying - but she doesn't strike me as a person prone to acts of selfless charity. I imagine she's heard the predictions that - in the short term - extra demand for goods and services from a million newcomers could give the German economy a bounce of up to 2% a year. And I expect she has heard predictions that, in the long term, lots of youthful foreign workers - once educated, trained and taught German, of course - could be the country's economic saviours.
A man in a Hugo Boss suit said to me in the cosy office of a think tank near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate that there were no fiscal arguments against the migrants, just political ones.
So don't be surprised by the fact Germany's powerful - and business-minded - tabloid press are still on side with the refugee project, or that the police in Cologne were reluctant to admit asylum seekers were among those accused of now infamous assaults in a crowd on New Year's Eve.
But don't underestimate, either, the extraordinary good will and generosity of Germans still volunteering in their millions to show that their country is a humane destination for the desperate.
And maybe there's a big divide between them and Raphael Hock and the millions he's making selling refugee accommodation to the government. But I'd warmed to him even before I found out he'd personally painted the flower stencils on the grey corridors of his care dome, before he'd mentioned that his girlfriend was a Kosovan Muslim, before he'd promised to change the catering company when two Afghan men complained they were sick of spaghetti. Hock told me Germany not only needed its refugees, it also had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to define itself by the way it treated them.
I don't know whether optimistic, rich Raphael best sums up modern Germany's steely pragmatism or its warm-hearted humanity. But I think there's a healthy dose of both in a country that's opened its doors to a million strangers pretty much overnight.
If that's impartial reporting then I'm Angela Merkel.
It has it all, pretty much: the strongly-directed narrative arc; the loaded language ("the extraordinary good will and generosity", "the desperate", "strangers", "warm-hearted humanity"); the link-free citing of 'predictions' predicting only good economic consequences from mass migration; even the old-fashioned BBC sense of unease about profit-making businesses (as compared to those who do good for the good of their hearts).
The BBC are relentless.
It has it all, pretty much: the strongly-directed narrative arc; the loaded language ("the extraordinary good will and generosity", "the desperate", "strangers", "warm-hearted humanity"); the link-free citing of 'predictions' predicting only good economic consequences from mass migration; even the old-fashioned BBC sense of unease about profit-making businesses (as compared to those who do good for the good of their hearts).
The BBC are relentless.
