Ethnicizing Attitudes without Negative Stereotypes: Poverty Images and Welfare Attitudes (original) (raw)
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Ethnicizing attitudes without stereotypes
Our study investigates the impact of media representation of poverty on welfare attitudes in Hungary. We focus on the role media images of extreme 'distress' play in the ethnicization of welfare attitudes. We argue that ethnicized images of poverty in themselves do not necessarily erode solidarity. The images of extreme hardship are those which tend to send ambiguous signals, ethnicizing the viewers' reactions. This effect is independent of and different from the influences of negative stereotypes in media reports. We conducted a video-vignette experiment, in which signs of hardship and ethnicity (Roma or not) were manipulated in a report on poverty. Our results show that the ethnic frame plays a minor role in shaping welfare attitudes when the portrayal of poverty lacks references to extreme distress. Images of deep poverty, on the other hand, prompt contrasting reactions in the two ethnic frames.
In the past two decades, many studies have warned of the role the popular media might play in the stigmatisation of the poor. Media reports about poverty often include references to antisocial behaviour, which make the principle of deservingness particularly conspicuous and could also strengthen the effects of ethnic stereotypes. We argue, however, that it could be misleading to place all the blame for stigmatisation on direct references to 'undeserving' behaviour. Media images of extreme distress themselves could have a selective stigmatising effect. Thus, even benevolent portrayal of the poor could erode sympathy. This paper presents the results of a video-vignette experiment on a sample of Hungarian students. The subjects watched one of four versions of a video interview with a poor person (none of them contained any references to antisocial behaviour) and then expressed their attitudes towards welfare payments. We found that support for welfare was higher where a version highlighted signs of extreme distress. But this was only the case if there were no mention of ethnic minorities. If the video report emphasized that Roma (Gypsies), the largest disadvantaged minority group in Hungary, lived in the neighbourhood, signs of their extreme hardship lowered the support for welfare payments.
Journal of computational social science, 2024
This study investigates the emotions portrayed in immigration-related visual media across multiple countries and their link to socioeconomic contexts. The analysis examines how socioeconomic factors like perceived corruption, GDP per capita, and income inequality predict the average emotional information conveyed in images associated with immigrants. Computer vision has been employed to analyze the emotional content in media images related to immigrants. Images were sampled from various online media outlets in 45 countries. Results indicate that socioeconomic indexes, especially corruption scores and GDP per capita, significantly predict the emotional content of media images related to immigrants. Specifically, higher perceived corruption and lower GDP per capita are associated with increased negative emotions in visual content. Further, a mediation analysis suggests those factors mediate the relationship between income inequality and emotional information in images. The analysis also considers gender differences, showing that emotions in images linked to immigrant men are more negative than those associated with women. These results align with theories indicating that higher perceived competition for resources due to inequality or scarcity can translate into immigrants being seen as threatening out-groups. The study underscores the link between societal factors and emotions in immigration-related visual media and the possibility of employing artificial intelligence techniques to measure it. Emotions in images associated with a given group, such as immigrants, can shape and reflect discourses about them in a given society; understanding how the context shapes these discourses can inform strategies to address the potential impact these discourses can have on immigrants and society.
Evolution of negative visual frames of immigrants and refugees in the main media of Southern Europe
El profesional de la información, 2020
The Mediterranean migration crisis especially affects three Southern European countries that represent the main gateways into the continent for immigrants and asylum seekers: Spain, Italy, and Greece. In recent years, feelings of rejection towards migration have been increasing in all of them, accompanied by a simultaneous increase in the number of hate crimes. Similarly, the representation of these groups in European news media seems to have worsened, especially since 2015, the year in which the migratory crisis significantly worsened. This coverage could be affecting European citizens on emotional, cognitive, and attitudinal levels and thus should be rigorously analyzed. The present study is based on the theory of framing and, specifically, on visual framing to analyze the connotative representations of immigrants and refugees spread by the reference media of Southern Europe through images, paying more attention to the negative frames in particular, which represent displaced peopl...
Journal of Social Issues, 2001
This article provides a comprehensive overview of research that has examined the content and prevalence of stereotypic media images of the poor. Research examining televised images and print media are reviewed. An analysis of media framing as well as classist, racist, and sexist imagery is provided. Additionally, to assess media depictions of the poor in the wake of welfare reform, 412 newspaper articles about poverty and welfare published during a 3-month period in 1999 were content analyzed. Although most articles were neutral in tone and portrayed the difficulties facing welfare recipients and the poor sympathetically, they did little to contextualize poverty or illuminate its causes. These findings are discussed in terms of their context and political function.
Public discourse regarding the Roma has been heated in many western European countries. This study investigates whether feelings of disgust, elicited through negative media portrayals, can lead to more dehumanization and support of deportation toward this minority. While Study 1 (N = 30) validated a measure of dehumanization in the Norwegian context, Study 2 (N = 195) experimentally tested whether disgust-eliciting media portrayals would increase dehumanization tendencies on this validated measure and support of deportation toward the Roma. As expected, reading a newspaper article focusing on allegedly low hygienic standards among the Roma increased the feeling of disgust, which, in turn, led to higher degrees of dehumanization and support of deportation. While being the first study experimentally showing that disgust leads to dehumanization of a real societal minority group, the results also have important implications for how media discusses and presents social issues regarding devalued minority groups.
Ethnic Stereotypes and Preferences on Poverty Assistance
The authors introduce a simple model of public preferences on poverty assistance. Their focus is on the roles played by the socioeconomic status of a potential welfare recipient and the stereotypes about his/her ethnic group in shaping taxpayers’ preferences on appropriate assistance. The model assumes that status not only informs one about the recipient’s material needs but also sends noisy signals about his/her 'deservingness'. Ethnic stereotypes about work ethic, in turn, help to process those noisy signals. The authors show that the influence of stereotypes on welfare preferences tends to diminish as the status of a potential recipient approaches middle-class standards. Their model points to the potential of institutional and media framing of poverty assistance in the ethnicization of welfare preferences.
The Politics of Otherness: Stereotypes in Hungarian Media
Traditiones, 2008
media studies 1 in post-socialist and post-eu enlargement contexts illuminate the ways in which individuals are vested not only with judicial competences, obligations, and entitlements (or lack of them) bestowed by the state and media empires, but also with particular modes of status, authority, and prestige endowed by the media market. moreover, media production and consumption is an arena in which majority-minority interests, ideologies, and practices of the markets, states, and the eu collide and collude. in these intersecting spaces, producers, state officials, and policymakers as well as consumers rearticulate and re-circulate identities, values, and meanings to create political and cultural identities. this analysis explores the dynamics of the media regimes and cultures of hungary, which joined the eu in 2004. rather than privileging the eu, the state, or the market, i examine the interchanges among them by asking how they both influence and reflect majority and minority consumer views. in particular, i investigate how media production and consumption is involved in creating subjectivities and public identities, shaping sociability, and belonging. What is clear is that the notion of "europeanization" necessarily involves domestication of eu media directives. however, by renegotiating neoliberal values and engagements of these directives, the various local consumers remake europe as europe remakes them. this is what manuel Castells may have in mind when he discusses the configuration of a global public space as dependent on the "global/local communication media system" (Castells 2008: 89). in an insightful study, daniel hallin and paolo mancini (2004) pinpoint three major models of the globalized media 1 this essay is a revised version of an earlier study (kürti 2008). research in hungary has been supported by the eu susdiv. eurodiv project diversity in arts production.