Discriminating News Content – a Mostly Systemic Issue
Most Swiss journalists display a strong willingness not to produce news stories that discriminate. So, why are stories that reproduce or strengthen harmful stereotypes nevertheless published on a regular basis? When looking at the issue of discrimination in media content from a systemic standpoint, it seems essential to raise awareness among journalists, editors, community managers, and sources about how discriminatory discourse may be perpetuated, rather than to shame them.
Most readers may have noticed occasional stories that implicitly associate a given nationality, ethnicity or religion with crimes or behaviors considered deviant. Among these are discriminating and problematic rhetoric of politicians or sources broadcasted in news reports or printed in newspapers, sometimes even used as headlines inside quotation marks.
Through a recent project on behalf of the Federal Commission against Racism, we sought to better understand the causes of news stories that can be seen as problematic from a discriminatory standpoint. Existing literature as well as early exploratory investigations suggest that – a handful of particularly problematic individuals aside, most Swiss journalists believe that they have a responsibility to avoid stories, wordings and framing that perpetuate negative stereotypes.
We then conducted three case studies of the production of news stories, reconstructing the different stages of their process to identify systemic issues that may explain problematic news content. We talked to journalists, editors as well as other actors involved in their production, who provided important insights into how they viewed discrimination, especially in the context of producing stories that could be deemed problematic.
Reflexive Journalists – Diverse Systemic Failures
Overall, the journalists we spoke to were highly reflexive about their own practices. They claimed to be able to easily identify stories that would be potentially discriminatory, providing examples of how they dealt with such situations. They spoke of the attention paid to where and how to mention origin, ethnicity or religion in the context of criminality. Several admitted they were probably better in theory than in their daily practices.
A story’s format, they explained, sometimes made it more difficult to avoid stereotyping. The shorter the story, the less available space for context that would provide a key nuance to avoid harmful stereotypes. Conversely, longer narrative forms, which adopt descriptive approaches, may unwillingly discriminate.
Exoticism makes for great stories and damaging stereotypes. Speed, intrinsic to news production, can also contribute to making stories problematic, either by reducing available time for adding necessary contextual information, or by preventing journalists from carefully identifying structures and wordings that unwillingly induce and reinforce preexisting stereotypes.
The choice of headlines is a frequent source of problems, even if problematic headlines are not always the work of rank-and-file journalists. Interviewees spoke of having had their headlines changed by higher-ranking editors but also confided that they were encouraged to produce sensationalist headlines, even when risking to reinforce prejudice. Such practices, it must be noted, do not exist in all newsrooms.
How journalists present third-party discourse is one of the key areas for possible adjustment in view of reducing potential discriminatory effects. While journalists have a responsibility to cover a wide range of political opinions, they also have a duty not to simply reproduce racist or xenophobic discourse without providing context. Moreover, they have a duty to hold their sources accountable. Thus, quotation marks do not entirely free journalists from their duty to use reported speech responsibly.
Reporting discriminatory speech within the context of free and democratic political debate makes journalists’ work difficult. Indeed, several interviewees felt that they were in a double bind: on the one hand, among the most sacred professional values of journalists is the duty to search for and report the truth; on the other, they and their affiliated news outlets often believe to be committed to a fairer, more open society. For example, they may on the one hand be aware of the stigmatizing effects of mentioning the origin of a convicted criminal and that some readers have a tendency to make implicit associations. On the other hand, in cases where it may legitimately be seen as helpful for understanding the overall context, withholding such information runs against professional norms, while also exposing them to attacks from far-right politicians. The long-term effects, one interviewee believed, are the undermining of trust in the news media as well as raising suspicions of a leftist hidden agenda.
While arguably over-simplistic, this view reveals real challenges for news workers, even if it has of course been shown that the concept of the truth is tricky to handle and cannot merely be collected objectively from a single external perspective.
Addressing Selection Bias
This brings us to arguably the most important point of all: journalists reporting on a chosen story often fail to highlight all perspectives of a given reality. The study of the representation of national, ethnic and religious minorities in news media reveals that coverage is overwhelmingly negative. These minorities are only ever in the news for negative reasons. They tend to be excluded from positive coverage not because there is nothing to be said, but because they remain largely invisible to traditional news values, which include a focus on negativity, and conflict, while also reflecting certain common ideas or tropes (including stereotypes).
This point has been extensively reflected upon from a more general point of view by the constructive journalism movement, – which we believe can help balance the mediatization of minorities. The fact that many journalists in Swiss newsrooms and many members of the above-mentioned minorities evolve in vastly different social circles also tends to reinforce the news selection bias. Increasing diversity in the newsrooms could therefore also lead to better outcomes.
Ultimately, our study confirms that tackling discrimination in the media by solely focusing on journalists’ individual beliefs and practices is unlikely to help. Indeed, our research shows that discrimination, when it appears in a story, stems from various stages of the production process and involves actors beyond the individual journalist. As such, agenda-setting, source-specific logic, editing of discourse and title selection, as well as time and economic pressures all contribute to discrimination in the news.
Annik Dubied is a Professor of journalism at the Academy of Journalism and Media, at the University of Neuchâtel.
Andrew Robotham is a Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Journalism and Media, at the University of Neuchâtel.
This blog post, which is part of our series on structural racism in Switzerland, is based on an article that appeared in 2022 in Tangram (number 46), a magazine published by the Federal Commission Against Racism and republished by the European Journalism Observatory.
