Page - 238 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Round Table Discussion | Worst Case and Best Practice 238 newspaper and I would say we can compare this Turkish newspaper, for example, to the Polish papers of the late 19th century and early 20th century. This huge Turkish paper produces a European edition, half of which is produced in Frankfurt. That's 20 pages every day from Frankfurt and 20 other pages from Istanbul. The Germans hardly ever occur. If they occur, they occur only insofar as they interact with Turks, positively and negatively. But it doesn’t appear if Angela Merkel announces that welfare will go down, or train fares will go up, or electricity bills will rise, although this is very important for the Turks. Normal life in Germany doesn't appear at all in these 20 pages. So they are restricted to their own ethnic community. Rainer Geißler But nobody of the Germans knows that they don’t appear. It’s totally irrelevant. That’s not the right comparison. Because no one reads these Turkish newspapers in Germany and so I don’t know that I... From the audience The Turkish minority reads them. Horst has talked about the Polish newspapers for the Polish minority, in Polish, written in Germany. The Poles couldn't learn about the Germans either. They didn't write about their German co-citizens in the same city, with which they were interacting everyday. The German papers didn't write about the Poles, the Polish papers didn't write about the Germans. And the modern Turkish press here, available in Germany, produced here for the Turks, in Turkish, doesn't write about the Germans, if it’s avoidable. Let's say there's a huge football match in Germany, with two million people watching on television, including half a million Turks. They would not report it, because there is no Turkish involvement. That’s not dialogical, because the German media report on Turks – very negatively, but they don't ignore them. But the German elites are in power, they pass the laws. And about these laws, which affect the Turks who live here, you don't learn anything in the Turkish papers in Germany. For 50 years they haven’t learned anything about this in these papers. Rainer Geißler Perhaps one sentence I would add to Horst’s: Ignoring the immigrants is not the worst case, but insulting the immigrants. Mentioning them, but insulting them. Negative pictures are worse than ignoring them.