Page - 85 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Petra Herczeg | Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Austria 85 Media and integration play interdependent roles in a society. Hafez (2005, 176) notes three different aspects of integration: - Civic integration, including, for example, participation in political processes; - Social integration, i.e., material and institutional integration; and - Cultural integration, which is necessary for forming personal identities and hybrid identities and relates to demands for equal rights for various cultures. For the process of integration, these three aspects are determining factors on the social and structural levels, but also on the individual level. The Austrian mass media make no effort to cover topics related to migrants’ special interests. As mentioned above, there is a lack of specific quantitative surveys on the media use and the media requirements of migrants. This research deficit is perhaps symptomatic for the treatment of minority media issues. Often enough, migrants are reported upon; they do not attain active roles in society’s mass media. Consequently, demands have been voiced that members of ethnic minorities should acquire positions in the editorial staff of large-scale media companies, so that their perspectives can be represented in the reports of the media. Such demands, which are not at all new, are still repeated when media issues are debated in the context of integration – a further indication of the standstill media politics has come to with respect to ethnic minorities. In Austria there is no daily newspaper in the language of an ethnic minority. Hence, the only media specifically catering for such audiences are certain daily programmes of the public broadcaster and the groups’ own ethnic media. The Burgenland Croats and the Slovenes, for example, have weekly journals; other ethnic groups publish magazines on a fairly regular basis. The government provides support for all of these media. The EUMC report from 2002 notes: “Newspapers in the Slovenian and Croatian languages are found to limit reporting to topics connected directly with ethnic identity, whereas media in the majority language are the main providers of general information and entertainment for minorities (Busch 1998). The result of this format is that minority media remain more dependent on state funding.” (EUMC 2002, 313) The majority of the population expects that ethnic minorities and migrants articulate themselves in the language of the majority. Language use “is the commonest form of social behaviour, and the form of social behaviour where we rely most on ‘common-sense’ assumptions” (Fairclough 2001, 2). Fairclough proceeds on the assumption that language is an important factor of power and remarks, “nobody who has an interest in relationships of power in modern society can afford to ignore language” (Fairclough 2001, 3). Language