Page - 36 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Rainer Geißler/Sonja Weber-Menges | Media Reception and Ideas on Media Integration 36 from mixed families consisting of natives and migrants were surveyed. We have excluded these because their patterns of behavior and attitudes are almost identical to those of the natives. The sample is representative for North Rhine- Westphalia. It can probably be assumed that to a certain extent the findings would also apply to all of western Germany. 2.2 Media use Media use depends on two important factors: on the media-related wants and needs of the migrants, but also on the programs that are offered. Furthermore, for all three groups media use is dependent on age, knowledge of the German language, and the length of the person’s stay in Germany. The older the migrants are, the less fluent they are in German, and the shorter the time they have lived in Germany, the more frequently they make use of their own ethnic media (figure 1). Nevertheless, any fear of large-scale ethnic media ghettos in Germany is unfounded. Media ghettos, that is, the exclusive use of ethnic media, with no German media made use of, are marked red on the diagram. Only small minorities of migrants exclusively make use of ethnic media. The largest one is the Turkish TV ghetto, with 31%. One of the reasons for this is that some of the women from Turkey are illiterate and do not have a very good command of the German language, either. Apart from this Turkish TV ghetto, media ghettos only involve between 6 and 10 percent of the migrants and, in one finding, 15 percent (an Italian TV ghetto). Large portions of the Russo-German population are assimilated in their use of media, that is, they make use only of German media (marked green on the diagram). This is true only of relatively small minorities of the Italians and Turks. However, the group of those who are assimilated is somewhat larger than those whose behavior corresponds to a media ghetto. The majority of the migrants makes use of both German and ethnic media and is, thus, interculturally integrated. 2.3 Views on ethnic media Only very few migrants have the impression that their ethnic media – for the Turks, Turkish media, for the Italians, Italian media, and for the Russo- Germans, Russian media – have segregating effects and report on Germany and the Germans in a negative way (figure 2).