READERS' RESPONSE TO ARTICLES ON ETHNIC MINORITIES IN THE BULGARIAN AND THE BRITISH PRESS (original) (raw)
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Analysis of The News Concerning The Roma Minority in Bulgaria
SELÇUK ÜNİVERSİTESİ İLETİŞİM FAKÜLTESİ AKADEMİK DERGİSİ, 2018
In this study news discourses dealing with the Roma minority in Bulgaria are analyzed. One of the most problematic issues facing Bulgaria in terms of the EU membership process was its attitude toward minorities. The government implemented several policies in this regard and was finally accepted as a member. The overall situation of the Roma minority has improved over time, but has the perceptions of society and the attitude of the media also changed with regard to minorities? This study is seeking answers to these questions. Media discourse plays an important role concerning the determination and maintenance of dominant ideas. Therefore this study mainly focuses on the news discourse related to the Roma minority. As a result it is observed that the news discourse maintains the current prejudices and ideologies about the Roma minority. In news items, the Roma minority are represented as marginal or different people who reside in illegal settlements, people who are more tolerant of violence, and people who need to be protected.
THE COUNTER-JOURNALISM OF ROMA MINORITY BROADCASTS IN BULGARIA
Svetlana D. Hristova. 2015. ‘The Counter Journalism of Roma Minority Media in Bulgaria’ In: Ogunyemi, Ola (ed.). Journalism, Audiences and Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, p.152-167, DOI: 10.1057/9781137457233, https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137457226, 2015
INTRODUCTION This introduction synthesizes sociological research that traces the dynamics of the media image of the Roma people as constructed by ethnic minority broadcasts. The study covers a monitoring period of 12 years (1996–2007) and is based on video and audio archives, which have been thoroughly analyzed. The study discusses the dynamic, socially constructed representation of the Roma produced by community broadcasts versus the traditional representation of the Roma in the mainstream media. Two types of broadcasts have been analysed for the purposes of the study: (1) community radio broadcasts or TV shows that are strongly focused on Roma issues and created by journalists of Roma origin, and (2) intercultural programmes of an educational kind, which are produced by either ethnically mixed or entirely non–Roma editorial teams for the purpose of promoting interethnic tolerance. This second type of programmes is also referred to here as “culturally–oriented”, “interethnic”, “educational” or “ethnicity–oriented” programmes. The objective of this study is to outline the developments of the new image of the Roma people in a situation of social change related to the emergence of community broadcasts. The research addresses the question whether the community–oriented polemical broadcasts have contributed to altering and renewing the public stereotype–laden representation of the Roma in Bulgaria. A few quite rigid representations of „the Gypsies” thrive in everyday space, and the image generally held by society involves violence, crime, and illiteracy as characteristics of this minority; “the Gypsies” have been viewed as a privileged object of affirmative policies and as a problematic group in both social and economic terms, yet as being continuously defended under international human rights conventions. In line with all this, this text describes the role of specific mass media channels for creating a new vision of the ethnic group, a vision that is thoroughly distinct from the hetero–stereotypes generally assuming the group’s social failure. The modernized portrayal of the Roma, expressed by the community media under study, has been based on the good practices and role models coming from the ethnic group itself. The significance of the study stems from the following occurrences. First, with the launching of community and intercultural programmes, the journalists involved in them have eagerly defended the Roma, underscoring they differ from the popular stereotypes regarding the group; and with the development of these programmes, an assertive representation of Roma identity has been established and the hybrid identity of the minority journalist appeared as a sociological quest. Second, community and interethnic broadcasts do not target exclusively the Roma community: their target audience is mainstream society as the potential recipient of intercultural education. This means there is a need for additional empowerment, trust, and popularization of community and ethnicity–oriented broadcasts in order to create their own ways of mediating information and changing perceptions towards the Roma. The rule of thumb is that community broadcasts reflect the will of the community and are produced by group resources. The Bulgarian media space has allowed their existence only as external productions funded by international donors. As for intercultural programmes, they are focused on various ethnic groups with the aim of promoting tolerance, diversity and intercultural education; typically, they are produced by a multiethnic editorial team. The funding of the culture–oriented programmes is miscellaneous but primarily comes from public resources or from non–governmental fundraising. The study employed a set of sociological methods. In–depth interviews and focus groups were conducted with Roma journalists and researchers, and supplied expertise regarding the Roma presence in electronic broadcasts. The audio and TV scripts of the broadcasts were subjected to content analysis, with a focus on the intensity of the messages, the latent coding of speech, the personalities being represented, the degree of their public participation, positive or negative representations and so forth.
The present article focuses on the stereotypes used by 20 print media when publishing on Roma people in Bulgaria. The study answers several research questions: To what extent hate speech matters in relation to the Roma can be found in the Bulgarian press and what type of hate speech cases is replaced with implicitly negative matters? What are the main topics concerning the presence of the Romain the national press and how are these topics distributed in the different printed media? What is the impact of the topical issues and events from the public agenda on the matters concerning the Rom a minority? What are the general trends when it comes to representing the Roma during an election campaign? The research uses a triangulation between the two types of content analysis methods: a standardised matrix for quantitative analysis and open-coding of the key words and traits. An extremely negative stereotyped image is observed focused mainly on their lifestyle compared to their personal traits. The stereotypes are interrelated within a meta-story that more or less sounds like that: The drunken swarthy offenders live in illegal ghetto houses and do not pay their utility bills. They live in large family clans that .fight each other depending on the interests of the big bosses.
Are We Still at War with the Other: Media Language Now and Then on Roma, Gypsies and Travellers
2023
The focus of the paper is upon a comparison of the language media in Bulgaria and the UK when talking about ethnic minorities, and more specifically on Roma in Bulgaria and Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Applying the sociocognitivist approach within the Critical discourse studies (van Dijk 2016), I revisit one of the most frequent metaphors, i.e. the one related to WAR, used by the media at the beginning of the century (2001-2005) and in 2020-2022. The reason to select that particular device is the fact that metaphors reflect thinking patterns and emotions that people share and are conducive to the establishment of a generalized image of various phenomena, and, in this particular case, of an ethnic group. At the same time, I hypothesize that the pandemic would probably take media attention away from ethnic minorities and thus coverage of the groups would be scantier and the language, in case there are articles on Roma and Gypsies and Travellers, more neutral and void of metaphors. The corpus for the analysis at hand comprises some of the most popular dailies circulated online in Bulgaria and the UK. The analysis has shown that despite the time difference and the pandemic, the attitude and the language the Bulgarian and the British media use in their presentations of this ethnic group in particular has not changed significantly and has not been affected significantly by Covid-19.
The Representation of the Roma ethnic minority in British newspapers
The aim of this research paper is to highlight the representation of the Roma ethnic group in four British newspapers throughout the year 2013; two mainstream papers which are The Daily Express and The Daily Mail and two broadsheets which are the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. Different articles from the mainstream papers and the broadsheets are collected through the Key Word Search in Context (KWIC)