Page - 233 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Round Table Discussion | Worst Case and Best Practice 233 Augie Fleras Didn’t you argue against the symbolic value of something this morning? From the audience If a news pronouncer in France would come up and say: “This is the evening news. We are in France all multicultural. Now the news.” That's not enough. You must have something real. In Russia it was very much like this. I have many books at home about Stavropol for example. 200 pages, and on the first page: “In Stavropol there live 150 nationalities. Now on to the real topics.” That’s not enough. (Laughter) It's true, I can show it to you, but it’s in Russian. That was less than symbolic, that was only affirmative about being “a multicultural nation”. But in the rest of the book there were no minorities. All Russians. I would say that was pseudo-symbolic. Petra Herczeg Yes, I also think that we need symbols to create a better image of migrants. You can only create a new image via communication campaigns and a lot of communication. You have to speak to the population and we see that there's a very big difference between the opinions in the heads of the politicians and a lot of journalists. They are in favour of intercultural communication. But if you ask the people “How do you think about intercultural communication?”, no one is in favour of intercultural communication. Perhaps because they made some bad experiences, because they are living in houses with a lot of foreigners, they are too loud and so on. This means we need a long time to change the minds and this has to be a big topic to the European Union to make image campaigns for example, to show that migration is a positive thing in our society and that we need migration. Horst Pöttker We are still working on the question what the media should do that people feel at home in a country. And I want to come back to this question, because I think there is a possible misunderstanding how it should be answered. Perhaps people might think migrants feel at home only if they are portrayed very good, as the better guys. That Journalists should not be allowed to say that Turkish people are criminal and such things. I think this is very dangerous because if the migrants are portrayed as better guys – and not as normal guys, as we