Seite - 189 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Kenneth Starck | Perpetuating Prejudice 189 communication that is mutually relevant. Persistence refers to durability that over time becomes routine. Symbolically points to various forms of ex- pression, and structure is the organizing of the material into identifiable patterns, or frames. What is the significance of framing? Framing is fundamental to what takes place in communication. It helps us identify and define the world around us and to find our place – or be placed – in it. As for the part that news media play, Reese states, “...the media are powerful, economic concerns, often distant from the audiences they serve, producing news as a commodity, generating frames that may distort as much as they illuminate...” (p. 29) As for othering, this is a similarly ambiguous term. The concept traces its origin back several centuries to the works of a number of philosophers and scholars. Combined with the notion of symbolic interactionism, which holds that people actively and creatively participate in the construction of their social being, othering presents a potent tool in understanding oneself or groups of people in relation to others. Here is a visualization of what is meant: Two mirrors face one another; one individual or group (the self) looks toward the other person or group (the other) and vice versa. Scholars have adapted the notion of othering to probe relationships among a variety of groups – professional, nationality, regional, sexual, among others. Our interest here involves minority groups. Othering, at least in one sense as used by Riggins (1997), is seen as the application of communication processes “that contribute to the marginalization of minority groups” (p. 1). Such analysis, Riggins asserts, can be useful in “advancing the study of pre- judice and social inequality in modern multicultural societies” (p. 1). An example of the application of the approach is Schneider’s (2001) examination of the German debate on immigration and the search for national identity. In the study, Schneider referred to the self as the “internal Other,” that is, German self-definition, while Others – he capitalized the first letter – referred to foreigners (“Ausländer”). Further, he stressed the role of the media “as the main transmitter of all sorts of public discourse” (p. 356) as well as access to and use of media by those in the other category. This othering model of self-definition is also the conceptual basis of the approach used by Ibish (2001) in his examination of anti-Arab discourse in the U.S. To support his charge of negative stereotyping of Arabs, Ibis developed the thesis that building the “illusion of the unity of the collective self” requires creation of “an illusion of superiority” (p. 120). The idea carries over into more extreme sentiments toward another group. In reviewing a variety of analytical approaches, Fiebig-von Hase (1997) wrote that extreme images – “enemy images” is the term used – seem to exist in all