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

152 Communicating Racism

nity center protesting against the racist propaganda of the Centrum Party. Apart from the public media and everyday talk, there is apparently at least an important third source for both racist and antiracist opinions: pamphlets, leaflets, flyers, or public letters. Racist pamphlets generally confirm and emphasize in more explicit ways the negative stereotypes many people already have against foreigners, whereas the party letter may argumentatively try to defuse such racist writing, either by giving counterarguments, facts instead of prejudices, or simply by disqualifying it as racist. Unfortunately, we have very few further data beyond a few of these examples about the possible role of leaflets on everyday talk about ethnic groups. Further studies on racism in discourse that focus on this form of communication are necessary.

Conclusion

From the examples given in this section, we have been able to reconstruct at least in part what people (say they) hear from others about ethnic groups. We have observed first that there may be a general reluctance or even fear to engage in such talk, either because of strong norms prohibiting racist talk or because of possible retaliation from the others. Second, people sometimes even avoid reference to such talk or don't remember instances of it by claiming that there is not much talk about foreigners at all, whereas at the same time it is conveyed that you hear "those stories all the time." Third, the vast majority of references to talk by others is in general terms: Neighbors or just "other people" tell stories or say general negative things about ethnic minority members.

The topics of such talk are the well-known stereotypes we also discuss in Chapters 2 and 4: They live on welfare, cause unemployment (two stereotypes of which the inconsistency is rarely noticed by the speakers), have strange habits such as sheep slaughtering, mistreat their women, make loud music, cause leakages, are dirty, and, aboye all, they are aggressive and criminal. These stereotypes may be marked as such and resented by the speakers, they may be doubted or may be accepted as true generalizations. Yet, independent of the speaker, the stereotypes are frequently identical, which, of course, is exactly what stereotypes are all about. Thus, even if they are not generally endorsed, they are at least generally known. Whatever the direction of the actual attitude, the stereotypes about foreigners thus have become consensual.

Finally, concrete stories told by family members, friends, or neighbors also pertain to events that illustrate these general negative opinions. This suggests that not any odd, even negative, story will do when persuasive talk is engaged in. Impressive stories in this case should neither

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be unique nor specific, nor illustrate a nontypical negative characteristic of ethnic groups (their lack of tactics in soccer, for instance), but must confirm "what we all know already." In other words, personal communications hardly seem to add anything new to what people know and believe about ethnic groups, at least in a stage in which these have been living in the country for several years already. Talk about foreigners, thus, is often a replay, an exercise, and a confirmation of the dominant ethnic consensus.

5. The media

On many occasions, people refer to the media as a source of information or as a source of ethnic opinions with which they may agree or disagree. Newspaper articles or TV programs may be read or watched by millions of people, and also form a source of topics and beliefs for everyday talk and comment. Although this book does not specifically examine the role of the media in the expression or reproduction of ethnic prejudice, it is obvious that interpersonal communication about ethnic groups, especially in the lowcontact arcas, is heavily dependent on media information. A striking example during our field work in a low-contact area was the frequent reference to a well-known talk show (Sonja Barend) on Dutch television, in which people who had voted the racist Centrum Party were allowed to explain why they had done so. Reactions to this program were divided and show how media information may be interpreted and represented in different ways by different viewers.

To limit a potentially vast list of topics of passages in which people refer to the media as a source, we have selected those that are rather typical and that fit finto the following practical content categories: (a) General negative, (b) Concrete negative, (c) Resentment of negative reporting, (d) Positive, and (e) Racist party propaganda.

a. General Negative: Crime Reporting

In this category, we find passages in which people mention the media in general, or the press in particular, for "evidence" about the negative characteristics of ethnic groups. Crime is the major topic in this case, although sometimes also other themes are mentioned, such as cultural differences or favorable treatment. Some of these topics are also discussed in racist party propaganda, which we deal with below. Passages in which people mention negative reporting specifically as a reason for their resentment against bad media treatment of

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statistics, as in example 30, or calculate the incidence of minority crime by the estimated proportion of articles about crimen committed by ethnic minority group members. Of course, selective and biased memory plays an important role in this case: Even a few reports about minority crime are salient, and confirming negative attitudes are better recalled or generalized (see Chapter 4 for details about such biases in ethnic information processing).

The largest Dutch newspaper (Telegraaf), selling more than 750,000 copies read by probably two or three times as many people, pays a lot of attention to crime and is one of the few national newspapers that still mentions the ethnic background of defendants. As our other examples show, people are well aware of this, and many resent it. This conservative newspaper, which, it is remembered, chose the side of the occupying Nazis during the war, mentions ethnic backgrounds as a deliberate policy, and actions against it have been met by plain refusal by the editor and by the reluctante of the union of journalists to demand a change of that policy. Also, the constitutional freedom of the press as well as the difficulty of proving deliberate racist intent as required by the discrimination article of the law have up to the present continued to frustrate legal action against this practice.

Our data suggest that such ethnically biased crime reporting has a pernicious influence on the beliefs and, hence, on the ethnic attitudes of many readers. Because most people have no immediate personal knowledge about or experiences with (ethnic or other) serious crime, much information is borrowed from the press. In principle, it should be possible to show with these data that deliberate policies to mention the ethnic background of crime may indeed contribute to legally prohibited inciting of racial hatred against minority groups.

Some people are aware of the specific consequences of such reporting, as we see in example 33, in which a prejudiced man explicitly states that it is "of course, nonsense" that all or most crime is committed by foreigners. Despite these rational reactions, many people, also in our examples (see, e.g., example 32), at the same time have fears that may be partly based on this kínd of crime reporting. Many interviewees, especially women, refer to the media for reasons for this fear and for their hesitation to go out at night or to visit the inner city. Compared to other cities in the world, Amsterdam is one of the safest. This suggests that fear, and in particular fear of "ethnic crime," is largely the result of crime construction by the authorities (the police) and the media, because it is also reproduced in everyday talk (Chibnall, 1977; Fishman, 1980; Hall et al., 1978). In a brief study about crime reporting in the Netherlands, Coenen and J.J.M. van Dijk (1976) suggest that the general score of "crime concern" among readers is directly correlated with the amount

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of crime news in the press: Readers of Telegraaf have the highest score. Conversely, once people have more fear of crime, they also tend to attend more than others to crime stories in the press. Thus, source or message characteristics are interactively related with the cognitions or emotions they help construct in the first place.

Example 35 is an instance of a different kind of information attributed to the media, namely, cultural differences in the treatment of women, a well-known stereotype in the Netherlands. The example is particularly instructive because the (female) interviewer is pressing the woman to specify how she knows "what everybody knows." The woman then resorts to the strategy of vaguely referring to a printed source, and although she probably doesn't remember a specific article, the topic comes up regularly in the press, and, therefore, has become common knowledge. Typically, however, it is not usually brought up in talk as a concern about women's rights, but rather as an example of the "backward" culture of "those foreigners. " At most, the women are pitied, or the foreign men blamed, which may lead to well-known problems of substituting racism for antisexism (Essed, 1982). We mention this topic because it is also a typical media issue: Although in high-contact areas people actually see that many Turkish or Moroccan women are treated differently or have less freedom according to (present-day) Dutch norms, most people know about this from the press. The woman in example 35 indeed refers to the press rather than to her own experiences in the high-contact neighborhood where she lives.

Thus, not only crime reporting in the right wing popular press, but also ethnic reporting in other media, may often have negative associations or implications even when it is not overtly racist (see van Dijk, 1983a, 1987b). It is this overall picture that is relevant for judging the long-term impact of media influence. And the indirect and subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination especially may not be detected as such by many readers. In fact, in our examples we only found resentment against blatantly negative portrayals, as in crime reporting or racist party propaganda. This resentment is mostly passive, however. People generally do not react against racist discourse or portrayal whether by the media or in personal communication, for instance, by active protests or other forms of action. In our passages, the interviewees do not explicitly resent either the general tendency of the news media to represent minorities as a problem in most areas of social life, or against the underrepresentation of minority members as neutral or positive actors and spokespersons. Such findings of academic research are not common knowledge because they are not reported in the press. As we shall see in somewhat more detail in Chapter 6, antiracist research results about the media and other elite groups are in fact either ignored or ridiculed by the press.

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b. Concrete Negative

Although both highand low-preju- diced people may refer to negative reporting in the media in a general way, high-prejudiced people especially mention concrete examples of events that show how criminal ethnic group members may be. In our next two examples, we find retellings of such press stories, and especially the embedding of such stories in argumentation and reactions make them interesting for our analysis of the reproduction of racism.

(36)I-C-6 (Woman, 60, low-con, P6)

We saw a program on television with a Dutch woman who was married to such a, such a uhh Turk, and that that didn't work out at all, and that wasn't even a small giri, but a school teacher .. .

(37)I-C-6 (Woman, 60, low-con, P6)

No, but that is true with those foreigners (???), and then you only have to read the paper ... How many of those cases that you read the paper, it is practically always a Moroccan or a Turk or such who have been involved in stabbing or shooting. Yes, and I think they could do something about that, because the other day that uh uh uh ... market gardener, whom they have say uhh who a former employee, such a Moroccan, such an illegal, knocked his brains out with a hammer, was in the paper last week, and his wife was lucky, she was called too, she thought God why is my husband staying out so late, and she also went to that hothouse, and she calls him, and then somebody tells her: Come here, because your husband is not well, but she thinks: WELL, there is something wrong, I am going to get the dog, and he ran away, otherwise she would have been dead as well, and only because you helped illegal Moroccans with a job. Yes, they have exploited them, that's what they say at least, you know, but well I don't believe that either .. .

Both stories are told by the same highly prejudiced woman, living in an elegant low-contact neighborhood of Amsterdam. It is the same woman who, in our previous section, tells of the experiences told by her daughter about foreign men "undressing her with their eyes," as well as many other negative stories. In the first example, she mentions a TV documentary in which a marriage between a Dutch woman and a foreigner went wrong. The example is, of course, used to argue that such marriages, and in general "living with" foreigners, are impossible. She mentions the fact that the woman was a teacher, and thereby suggests that she was not just a "dumb kid" fooled by a foreigner, but an intelligent woman who must have made a deliberate decision (and who might be supposed to have less prejudice against foreigners). This is again a nice example showing how a single instance of a TV story may be interpreted negatively and then be generalized by viewers.

The second story has been discussed before (in Chapter 2) as a characteristic story about foreigners. The events as recalled from the press

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Notice in these three passages by three women that there does not seem to be a firm, preconceived criticism of the press, but rather a hesitantly formulated doubt about negative crime reporting. People resent, however, that the ethnic background of defendants is often mentioned and have the impression that this may contribute to their own fears as well as to those of others.

d. Positive Reports

The media also feature articles or programs that might be understood as positive or in favor of ethnic minority groups. Different reactions are possible in that case. A few people pick up the positive message and use it as evidence for their own positive beliefs. Often, this positive message is negative, however, in the sense that it is negative about Dutch people who are racist or have been discriminating against ethnic groups. Also, according to the findings by Hartmann and Husband (1974) a decade ago for the English press, people get most information about discrimination against ethnic groups from the media. This seems likely and our data confirm this, because in everyday talk among majority group members there are, of course, very few negative stories about their own group. An external, official instance, such as (a few!) TV programs, is the only possibility to discuss such topics systematically. Yet, people are generally aware of them, as they show indirectly when they state that "we are not allowed to say negative things because then we are accused of discrimination."

Other people plainly resent media messages or even incidental actors who advocate antidiscrimínation or a positive attitude toward ethnic groups. In this case, the media appearance of antiracist people is not generalized but individualized as the (questionable) opinion of one single person. Or else, the media are viewed as the channel for the "institutional voice," associated with the power institutions, such as the national or local government, as we see in example 42 below.

(41)II-PD-5 (Woman/man, 60/65, high-contact, P6/P5)

(Sometimes 1 am so mad) They simply get priority. Television too,

minorities, minorities. When you wake up you hear minorities, minorities .

(42)I-G-7 (Man, 45, market vendor, P6)

A few months ago 1 saw on TV, there was a minister who telis a Turk, a Turkish girl it was I believe in Sonja Barend's show and she says yes

but the Dutch they put us off, then that minister says, I don't remember his narre, but he says but the DUTCH have to adapt to those foreign-

ers. I ask you, where are we heading like this?

(43)III-GE-3 (Woman, 38, low-con, P2)

(S) I used to think that there is no discrimination in the Netherlands.

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But I am changing my mind about that. Although Ido not see it personally, I read about it in the paper and see it on TV, and therefore it is probably true, like Blacks who are not allowed to go into some dance

clubs .. .

(44)III-ES-2 (Woman, 32, social worker, low-con, P2)

(S)Dutch people haven't become more tolerant these years. Of course

I don't know this from personal experience, but from what I read and hear. Even the government makes it more and more difficult for immigrant workers, like the recent debate in Parliament about a law proposing special constraints on young foreigners who want to marry a foreigner who still lives in the original country.

The woman in example 41 expresses her general resentment against ethnic minority groups, as well as talk and media reports about them. Instead of using the term foreigner, she intentionally and repeatedly uses the formal term of minority, both ironically and scornfully. Thus, she expresses at the same time the favorable attitude toward ethnic groups by the institutions. The man in example 42 mentions a specific program (again Sonja Barend's TV talk show), and two particular advocates of the foreigner's case: a Turkish girl and a cabinet minister. He focuses especially on the controversial issue of adaptation, which we earlier found to be one of the most frequent topics in our interviews. The dominant view is that ethnic minorities should integrate into Dutch society, and, therefore thé reproduced statement of the minister is commented on very negatively, namely, as a completely wrong policy for Dutch society.

The other two examples specifically deal with media sources for information about ethnic discrimination. The last one is particularly revealing because it shows that less prejudiced people do not associate the authorities at all with the case of the ethnic groups. On the contrary, the government is perceived as devising and enacting laws that keep foreigners out as much as possible. The law referred to in this example was eventually repealed (in 1985) because it simply didn't work according to a research report, and not because it discriminated against foreign youths in the Netherlands. It should be recalled here that practically all government or institutional actions are known to the public specifically through the media. Laws, parliamentary debates, and policies, as well as the general issues of talk they give rise to, are again reproduced by the media, and do not emerge from personal experiences or everyday talk.

Because, in this case, very important issues are involved, such as rights of ethnic groups or protection against discrimination and racism, it is, of course, highly relevant how the media represent such official acts: positively, neutrally, or critically. We have been able to show (van Dijk, 1983a), that the majority of the national press represents the official policies and acts in a neutral and sometimes positive way when ethnic affairs are involved. There is little explicit criticism in the press of

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government policies that are unfavorable to ethnic minority groups. This leaves the reading public again with a dominant view on ethnic relationships, and they are deprived of repeáted critical arguments against such policies. Indeed, example 44 is the only example in all our interviews in which the government is actually criticized for negative policies against ethnic minority groups. In most other cases in which people are critical, this is directed against the racist CP party, and this criticism is also in line with the dominant view, namely, that racism is limited to a fringe of extremist people and such a racist party. Let us examine a few instances that are particularly relevant for the latter type of media references.

e. Racist Propaganda

In the 1982 national elections for the Dutch parliament, the incredible happened—a small racist party (Centrum Party) managed to get one seat. This led to much confusion, also in the press, because journalists didn't know how to handle such a representative: avoid writing about him and his party altogether, or write critically, with the risk of giving too much publicity or raising sentiments of compassion with the "lonely hero." What they eventually did was what the press routinely does anyway: It did not systematically or critically report the racist backgrounds and links of the party or party members, but focused on incidents, conflicts, or fights in which the party was involved. Also, the media featured a long discussion about whether or not such a party should be prohibited. The dominant view in that discussion was that prohibiting any party was against the basic principies of a democratic society. Whether the rights of minorities, as protected by the first article of the Constitution, were threatened by the official existence and parliamentary legitimization of a racist party, was a view that was much less defended. As usual, the minority point of view was barely represented in the press.

As an official political party, the CP also had the right to claim TV time to broadcast its ideas. Which it did, and also in this way its antiforeigner (but officially not racist) program was made known to millions of TV viewers. Yet, at the same time, CP ideas were taboo is the dominant ideology, which led to the overall confusion of many people who endorsed its xenophobic propositions. This confusion also emerges in many of our interviews, especially those in group III, which were taken just after the election and during the media debate about the CP. By this time, the small percentages at the national level appeared to grow to a serious 10% in municipal elections in the newly built town of Almere, 30 miles from Amsterdam, to which many people from the capital's innercity neighborhoods had moved, often also to escape from the urban