The media doesn’t distribute this news.
I am glad I looked further. The explanation given by the AI was totally confusing. It all makes a lot more sense when you discover there is a separable verb ‘bekanntgeben’, which means to announce or to give out.
See also “bekanntmachen”: dict.cc | bekanntmachen | English Dictionary
Separable verbs are a very common source of confusion for German language learners, at least until you start to learn how to spot them.
It’s interesting to me that even native english speakers get confused by this, because they have “phrasal verbs”, which are basically the same idea, except that they are never written together.
In this case you could translate “geben … bekannt” literally as “give known” or more naturally “make known”, which as far as I know is a pretty common expression in english.
Yeah, but the difference is that we don’t throw part of it all the way to the end of the sentence:
Sie machen es wahrscheinlich morgen bekannt.
They’ll probably make it known tomorrow.
In English, “make” and “known” are much closer together than “machen” und “bekannt” auf Deutsch. Also, because of SVO, most English speakers are trained to understand that the verb (the entire verb!) is almost always in the second position of the sentence. It’s weird to get to the very end of a sentence clause and find what looks like an extra dangling word there that forces you to go backwards and re-parse the entire sentence, because it’s actually not a word at all, but rather a prefix that belongs to the main verb.
You do kind of get the hang of it over time, but the beginner to intermediate stages when learning German can be pretty rough for English speakers.