Page - 236 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Round Table Discussion | Worst Case and Best Practice 236 backgrounds. They just go, film, take statements, lift the micro to school boys and these school boys tell things. So I think one thing is commercialization, is having no time for background thinking, for doing it on a deeper level, and no time to bring in some reflection. Leen d’Haenens What about the allusion of self-censorship? Look at the Netherlands after the murder of Theo van Gogh. Two months after the crisis itself you can see that there’s a lot of framing on who's responsible for this. The conflict is framed heavily there. And if you look at the year 2005, you see there is much less framing going on. So what could be the reason for that rational phenomenon? Could it be that journalists are afraid or have become afraid of opinion, of polarising – are they self- censoring themselves? Because there is this whole conflict of freedom of expression and offending people. They want to keep away from van Gogh's practice as a journalist. So now we have this portraying in a very neutral fashion. And I have the impression that for the French reporters, opinion matters much more than just coverage and transmitting the information. Souley Hassane I think the real problem in France, you can say, is a cultural, an ideological problem. It is not only the mainstream media. Because when I hear a politician, who declares publicly, he is against Muslims or Arabs or Blacks, the consequence is that he pushes the media to produce the information, because the media need this information. The politicians understand that sometimes it is useful for them to produce a negative public discourse about minorities. Because they always want to be on the media. The function of this discourse in the public space is the creation of opinion. And I think there is negative dynamic of producing information on minorities between politicians and the mainstream media. I think it is a bad practice in France to use the minority, the negative opinion on minorities as an instrument of politics. I think that they can contribute to make the migrants feel at home by avoiding this manner which considers the minorites as instruments of the production of a political opinion. Augie Fleras I have to admit that Kenneth's probing comment, on what we mean by making people feel “at home”, might be an interesting one to play through in terms of your own person's experiences. When you go and live in someone else's home on a visit,