Page - 225 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Round Table Discussion | Worst Case and Best Practice 225 necessary, in order to surmount certain obstacles in society. So it’s that kind of Ying-Yang between uniformity and diversity. The commonality proceeds, but the exception, the difference is workable if necessary. That’s the theory; the practice is much more different. Now, just a comment: I think that this kind of multicultural model can also be applied to the news media and to journalism. This notion, this idea that the content should not be about extremism or sensationalism or about ethnic exotica but in fact should focus on the responsibility that the news media have towards inclusion and integration. Which means that they have to very seriously rethink some of the news values that are associated with what constitutes newsworthiness – which brings me to the point that Ken and Leen made. I agree with you that a world in which we undermine this distinction between “us” and “them” and create a “we” is in fact an ideal world. But as Ken pointed out, there are certain ideals within the news media that are very difficult to implement in the 21st century. That notion of newsworthiness is based precisely on an us-them dichotomy, the notion of protagonists. So this medium of the negative continuity tries to frame the world in terms of conflicts – which of course makes it very difficult to achieve a “we”, because it’s the “us” and “them” that constitutes a core, if not THE core news value. Without conflict, you have no news. I think most people live in that scheme. Leen d’Haenens I agree with this and it’s also a matter of extending the “we”. And there is a market for that, if you get more members of your society to read your news. We know this from our research about youngsters. The Turks and the Moroccan youngsters, especially the Moroccans, experience a lot of hunger for Dutch news – so there is a market in the market logic. If you look at a certain event from a broader perspective you can have it really much more overall on the news agenda – because you reach different kinds of readers. A certain topic may be out of the news after a week, although the Turks are still looking for more news. So it’s just a matter of broadness. You know – and you mentioned it too, Heinz, yesterday – that the Turkish and Moroccan youngsters are experiencing much more news hunger in general than their Swiss counterparts. So there’s a market for you as a newsmaker. I wonder about what you were saying about Canada and the Canadian model: Of course, as you said, Canada has a conditional immigration policy: In order to become a new Canadian you have to respond to a certain profile – agewise, languagewise, in professional terms also, right?