прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Communicating Racism

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everyday" or "one reads everyday," and we also included these general statements that were thus vaguely attributed to others. Yet, such general references differ from the more concrete ones made to statements made by identified others. Therefore, we established a scale of closeness of interpersonal communication contacts, as follows:

(1)Family members

(2)Friends

(3)Acquaintances, colleagues

(4)Identified neighbors

(5)Neighbors in general

(6)People in general

(7)Authorities, institutions

This scale represents not only an approximate measure of social distance for the speakers, but (therefore) also a measure of the amount and familiarity of interpersonal communication. The same remarks hold as those made for the prejudice scale: It is merely an abstraction and a practical approximation—some people may actually have more or more intimate contacts with friends or colleagues than with family members. The figures used below, therefore, are not more than first impressions of the possible generality of our qualitative results, as well as possible suggestions for further discourse analysis and comparisons.

With these caveats in mind, we may tentatively give some figures that relate closeness of personal sources with types of prejudice. The average score for the closeness of communication sources on this scale is 2.8, which suggests that the majority of the references are to rather close others. The prejudice level for the people who refer to other people as a source is 3.7, which is somewhat higher than the overall prejudice mean of 3.4. Interestingly, the prejudice score of people who use their own family members as a source is markedly higher (4.8) than the prejudice level for those who refer to more distant sources (which is around the mean of 3.4). More source references are made by women (they account for 62 % of the references), than by men (38 %), whereas the proportion of men and women interviewed is 45 % to 55%. As for all interviewed, there is no difference between the prejudice levels of men and women who mention other sources, although, as we shall see below, young women have a lower prejudice score than young men, and older women have a slightly higher score than older men.

The area in which the references are made does seem to matter, however. People in the low-contact areas usually refer to closer sources (2.6) than those in high-contact areas (3.0). This might be explained by the fact that in the high-contact areas, people may more often refer to sources such as neighbors and the neighborhood, whereas in the low-contact

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areas, sources referred to are family members or friends, because there the relevance of talk about ethnic groups among neighbors or people in the street is much lower (in fact, many interviewees say this explicitly). In the high-contact areas, the prejudice level of those who refer to other sources is 4.4, whereas it is only 3.1 for the low-contact areas. These figures are higher than the overall prejudice means for those areas, especially in the high-contact areas (where it is 3.9 for all interviewed persons). This difference suggests that people in high-contact areas tend to have recourse for their negative opinions to stories and opinions of others, or that people who are more prejudiced give more accounts of interpersonal communications about ethnic groups. Apparently, prejudiced people tend to mention others for evidence for their opinions, which also suggests that they are more engaged in the everyday reproduction of racism.

The Media

The mean prejudice score for people who mention the media is somewhat lower (3.3) than for those who mention personal communication (3.7). However, this may be an area effect: In low-contact areas people must draw their beliefs more often from the media. The calculated prejudice scores for people who mention the media are lower in low-contact areas (2.9) than for those reporting media sources in high-contact areas (4.6). Although the differences are small, there seems to be a reverse media-area interaction: People who mention the media in low-contact areas are below the mean of 3.1 for all who mention sources in that area, whereas those who mention the media in high-contact areas are 0.2 aboye the mean of 4.4 in that area. The reverse is true for interpersonal contact: In high-contact areas people who refer to others are slightly less prejudiced (4.2) than the mean of their neighborhood (4.4), and those in low-contact areas people who mention personal sources are somewhat more prejudiced (3.2) than the others in the area (3.1).

Interestingly, prejudice seems to be lower for people who refer to the newspaper as a source (3.1), than for those who mention television (3.7). This suggests that the paper must be used more often for moderately prejudiced opinions, or that low-prejudice people use the paper relatively more often to substantiate their opinion. There may also be an area or education effect here: Because (in this kind of superficial analysis) low-contact areas overall score lower on prejudice, and because people in these areas have better jobs and more education, the general reliance on TV in the poorer high-contact areas may account for more references to TV as a source. It is strange that the radio is little mentioned as a

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source, despite its frequent ethnic programs, and despite the fact that during the daytime (when there is little television in the Netherlands) people at home often listen to the radio. The communication relationships, thus, may be very complex, and it is certainly not the case that from this difference we should conclude that television is more prejudiceinducing than the press. On the contrary, in the Netherlands there is an impression that TV programs generally are somewhat more positive about ethnic groups than at least the widely read popular press. As a public broadcasting organization, television must remain closer to official norms. Generally, we have the impression (but no statistical data), that television programs more often than the press feature ethnic minority speakers.

Reported Facts

As a crude measure of the kind of "facts" attributed to sources, we first associated each passage with a measure for implied attitude toward ethnic groups or ethnic relations as it emerges in the account of such a fact: 1 for a positive, 0 for a neutral, and -1 for a negative event told about ethnic groups. In some cases, such facts also pertain to events or acts involving Dutch people in relation to ethnic groups. For instance, an act of discrimination, when mentioned, is here simply counted as evidence in favor of ethnic groups, as are also, of course, any acts that directly favor ethnic group members.

The vast majority (103 or 52 %) of all references are made to negative facts about ethnic groups, whereas in only 14 cases (7 %) are positive facts reported about ethnic group members. The rest of the cases are neutral (or no specific facts mentioned). It is striking, however, that the prejudice level of people who do report negative facts is lower (3.4) than those who report positive facts, neutral facts, orno facts at all. This suggests that people do not use others primarily as a source for confirming their own opinion, but merely as a source for topics, which may be evaluated independently. Indeed, people often mention that others or the media say negative things about ethnic groups, and then state that they resent that. Note, though, that this may also be an obvious move in the wellknown strategy of positive self-presentation. The converse may also be true: People may mention that others say something positive about foreigners, and then tell the interviewer that they do not agree with that evaluation.

Reactions

Apparently, in addition to the reproduction of facts, we also need a measure for the reaction people display

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to such facts. As a positive (negative) reaction, we counted each reaction (whether commenting on a positive, neutral, or negative fact attributed to a source) that implies a positive (negative) attitude toward ethnic minority groups. We found that the neutral and absent cases dominate (114 or 56 %), followed by the negative reactions (56 or 28 %). Only 28 reactions are positive. In this case, there is a clear difference in prejudice level: People who react positively are at the 2.6 level and people who react negatively are at the 4.2 level. This suggests that most positive reactions tend to be against the negative attitude that is associated with negative "facts" (mostly stereotypes about ethnic groups). However, in this case, we only have a general measure of how people react to reproduced facts.

More enlightening is how people react to positive or negative facts as reported. This shows that, indeed, most negative reactions (52) are reactions that are in line with the negative facts. In a few cases (10), people show a reaction that is in accordance with a positive fact (and the mean prejudice level for people who do this is 3.4). In only two cases do people mention a positive fact to which they react negatively (and this happens for people with a high [5.5] prejudice level). In 18 cases people react positively to a negative fact, that is, they seem to contradict what sources tell them. As expected, such active counterarguments tend to be formulated by people with a low prejudice level (2.1).

Despite the few positive reactions, however, we see that, overall, people either tend to avoid reaction, give a neutral reaction, or their negative reaction concurs with the negative direction of the facts they reproduce. At the same time, reported facts are markedly more negative (their mean is -0.4) than the mean of the reactions, which is -0.1. In other words, although there is a general tendency toward negativity in both reported facts and reactions, people represent their own reactions more positively than the facts reported through others or the media.

Opínions

From the passages about sources, that is, from reported facts and people's own reactions to such facts, we may also infer the ethnic opinions people attribute to such sources (or people speaking through such sources, such as people quoted in the press or appearing on television). If we compare such an opinion attribution with explicit personal opinions or explicit opinions of the interviewees, we obtain a measure of agreement. Again, we did so only in a very rough and approximate way. Subtle discourse analysis is needed to assess in detail exactly how people (dis)agree with others in their ethnic opinions. Note that this agreement need not be identical with the kínd of reaction: Such a reaction may be focused on a single fact reported about a 5ource.

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pie. For the 14 positive facts, 7 are attributed to the media and the other 7 to other people. The negative facts are drawn relatively more often from personal communications: 76 of 103 facts are attributed to talk. Generally, then, the media are referred to less often as a source of negative facts. This agrees with the observation made aboye, that the average prejudice level for people who mention the media is lower than for people who mention personal sources. In our case, this might partly be a sampling effect because relatively more interviews and source-denoting passages were recorded in low-contact areas (121 of 198 or 61 %), where people happen to score lower on prejudice and at the same time must rely more on media information about ethnic groups and ethnic relations.

Also, we saw that the prejudice level for people referring to other people as a source is higher than for those who mention the media, although, this difference may have several explanations. For instance, it might suggest that (negative) personal communication is more effective than media communication, that the media generally are less negative about ethnic groups, or that the media are less often used (and mentioned in talk) for information that supports negative opinions, or, again, that more prejudiced people make less use of media information in general. Such alternatives may be decided only by further investigation of the content of the media, the facts or opinions attributed to the media, and, of course, by a full-scale analysis of media usage, which cannot be the task of this book.

It was mentioned earlier that there is a recipient difference between newspaper and television source mention: People who refer to TV have a higher prejudice score (3.7) than people who refer to the press (3.1), a difference we attributed to a well-known area/education effect for media usage (see, e.g., Robinson & Levy, 1986, for analysis). Similarly, there are also source differences: People do not just mention the media but also different kinds of people who speak in/through the media. Therefore, we distinguished between a general voice, in which no particular media-actor attribution is made, a particular (autochthonous) voice, and a particular minority voice, such as when members of some ethnic group are mentioned as media actors. Finally, there is the official voice of the institutions, such as the local or national government. Generally, people react negatively to the official voice (overall reaction mean is -0.5, and agreement level -0.8), whereas the few references to ethnic representatives tend to be positive. The absolute numbers in these cases are too low, however, to draw conclusions from these differences. It emerges from our qualitative analyses, however, that the official policies, whether for or against ethnic groups, tend to be judged negatively. The authorities are usually blamed for "letting them come," for "favoring them," and for "not doing anything against all this." ,

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and which ethnic facts or opinions are attributed to such sources by people of different ethnic opinions. Tentatively, a few social constraints (such as area, education, age, and gender) might be detected in the description of the groups that mention such sources. More important for our analysis, though, is to see in which respect the media and/or personal communication are mentioned more often, and how or for what reasons. Crucially, we find that most (assumed) facts attributed to other sources, whether one agrees or not, are negative. People often react to this neutrally, but if they do show an opinion, then it tends to agree with the predominantly negative facts as reported. Yet, antiprejudiced people also mention such negative facts, mostly in order to show disagreement or to emphasize that many (other) people are prejudiced. Although we assumed that television is generally less negative than the press (for instance, because it does not repon ethnic crime news on a regular basis), people referring to TV as a source tend to score somewhat higher than those who refer to the printed media (which may be a combined area- occupation-education effect). Personal communications more often serve as a negative source than the media, however. Indeed, these are the sources for the highly persuasive stories about (negative) personal experiences. The media are rather used for reference to more general information about ethnic groups (immigration, official policies, or unemployment, but also discrimination).

4. Topics of talk

W hat do people hear and read about? Now that we have some general facts about the source types and reactions by different groups to communications about ethnic groups, it is, of course, crucial to know about the contents attributed to these communications. For the opinion interviews, we only have what people tell us as evidence about source contents, and such reports are usually highly fragmentary, incomplete, and biased. However, we suggested, it is exactly the summarized and subjectively transformed nature of such reports that gives us clues about the ways people have actually interpreted such source contents and about how they communicate them to others. Also, differences between people's accounts of the same events allow us to compare source information and reported information. And finally, people are sometimes rather accurate in reporting source information, and then may add their own, independent, opinion to the facts as reported.

In this section, then, we focus on the overall contents, that is, on the topics of the passages in which interviewed people refer to other sources.

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Again, we approach these data from several points of view. We examine them in a nearly raw state, with a qualitative design, as well as more systematically by categorizing topics in a few clusters. We also give some descriptive quantitative data about the uses of various topics in different neighborhoods and by different people.

Personal Communication: Examples

To start our analysis, we first give a few characteristic examples of the different ways people may refer to sources of information about ethnic groups. Some of the passages in which this happens are very long and occupy pages of transcript, whereas in (many) other cases people just say things like "You read about that in the papers" or "Oh, yes I saw that on TV." For a topical analysis, this also means that the actual content of what is drawn from other sources is not always explicit, or it may be mingled with contents of the rest of the interview, and, hence, integrated with personal opinions, experiences, or other memories, as well as with the contents expressed by turns of the interviewer.

For each example we have added, after the code number identifying an individual interviewee, some data about that person: age, gender, occupation (if known), highor low-contact area, and the overall prejudice score we have assigned on the basis of our qualitative analysis of the whole interview. Some passages are from interviews with two people, mostly family members or friends. The English version is merely an approximation and often markedly less natural and colloquial than the Dutch original. For the (macro)analysis of topics, this is, however, less of a problem. Because many of the passages are very long, or contain irrelevant information for this stage of analysis, we have sometimes summarized them in our own words. In that case, a passage (or turn) is preceded by (S). Literal quotes in summaries have been signaled by double quotes. Summaries enclosed in parentheses are summaries of parts that have preceded, that follow a passage, or summarize what an interviewer said. We give them only as necessary context for better understanding of the passage referring to other sources. Passages that are (translated) literal quotes from interviews are also given to show some of the interesting local details of reported talk, media contents, or communication processes about ethnic groups.

To organize our discussion of the examples, we have provisionally categorized them in four classes: (a) the general nature of talk about foreigners, (b) denial or avoidance of such talk, (c) references to general stereotypes in such talk, and (d) mention of concrete events experienced by known people. Some examples are given in the different categories.