Page - 230 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Round Table Discussion | Worst Case and Best Practice 230 And in the last years they stopped migration. There’s no immigration and emigration that was balanced. There was not one person who came to Germany. We had a loss of population. Now we made the first steps and perhaps, I hope, that in half a century we will have made some progress, but I think not to a multicultural society, because we have another history. We don’t have this immigration history, Horst explained. We have other conditions. There are structural differences between the classic immigration countries, North America or Australia or New Zealand, and those modern immigration countries that now need immigration for demographic reasons. Kenneth Starck It may well be that there is some kind of timeline of development or activation that takes place here. This might be a starting point: Whether the land is relatively open and being settled versus a society that has already been settled. But nonetheless it may be that the timeline is still in effect. One of the reasons why I think this is the reference to French newspapers not having reporters who are able to go into a war-like zone for coverage. Because I remember, back in the 1960’s in the United States, the Los Angeles Times was covering the Watts riots – those of you who are interested in history will know that – and there was not a black reporter at the Los Angeles Times at all. They did find an African American who was working in the classified advertising section and they persuaded him to go into the area and telephone back to the news desk what was taking place. Now, in the United States that occured almost 50 years ago and that was, I think, a water-shed event in terms of integrating, in this case, African Americans into society. Because coming from that was something called the Kerner Commission Report which made a very close analysis of the media handling of minority groups in the society, especially the African Americans. And it made some dramatic recommendations which ultimately were picked up by many institutions in society, including most especially journalism and mass media schools. As well as professional journalism associations who suddenly recognized that they had to set up special programmes to bring minorities into the recording pool of talent. And I think this had a very positive effect subsequently. It certainly hasn’t solved all the problems by any means, but anyway: the point is that it may be possible over time that these various things have to recure in different societies and different times.