NaDiRa short study: Racism in politics and the media

Open and subliminal racism in the political and media public sphere

National Monitoring of Discrimination and Racism (NaDiRa)

Project team:

• Hartmut Wesser
• Chung-hong Chan
• Philipp Müller
• Katharina Ludwig
• Alejandro Ecker
• Marius Sältzer
• Michael Imre

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Project description:

Media-mediated racism is reflected in explicit disparagement and hostility. But it also manifests itself more subtly, namely in distortions in language use and in a latent emotional colouring in communication about racially, ethnically or culturally defined "others". Such distortions and colourings also influence how people feel about certain groups. On the one hand, the research project investigated the extent to which members of the Bundestag are confronted with racism on Twitter. On the other hand, we worked out which forms of implicit racist discrimination are found in the German news media, to what extent and towards which groups.

Results:

Our results show that tweets directed at MPs with a migration background contain racist statements more often than tweets directed at MPs without a migration background. Some politicians, especially those with a migrant background, can hardly avoid racist remarks on Twitter. For some MPs, when certain issues are raised, racist comments make up a very large part of all the responses they receive at all.

There was a strong subliminal negative portrayal of some social groups in media coverage in 2017 and 2018. This was particularly true of groups associated with Muslim countries, as well as countries from which a large number of refugees living in Germany originate. However, we found few explicitly stigmatising reports about these groups. It is possible that journalists have internalised that it is not appropriate to portray refugees or Muslims negatively. On the other hand, in reports about groups from poorer countries, we found consistent negative group assessments - subliminal and explicit. So there seems to be less social inhibition among journalists to negatively charge group attributions.

Surprising insights:

The extent to which some politicians are confronted with racism on Twitter on a daily basis surprised us. Furthermore, we found it remarkable that different groups are subliminally portrayed negatively depending on the medium studied. As a result, strongly divergent group-related stereotypes could become established in different population milieus.

Significance for practice:

Classification algorithms like the one we developed in this project to analyse racism on Twitter can also be used to automatically pre-select potentially offensive tweets, or to moderate social media discussions and protect users from attacks.

Our analysis of news reports is based on a self-developed classification algorithm, which we make available under an open source licence via the software platform github. It is suitable for analysing implicit and explicit group stigmatisation in all German-language media texts and can be used by all editorial offices, publishing houses and media researchers. In particular, our methodology offers for the first time the possibility to also uncover implicit negative group attributions, which can be helpful for a critical self-analysis.

Publications:

• Ecker, Alejandro; Imre, Michael; Müller, Samuel & Sältzer, Marius (2022): Rassismus in sozialen Medien: Automatisiertes Erkennen rassistischer Hetze in der virtuellen politischen Öffentlichkeit. DeZIMinutes, Berlin: Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (DeZIM).

Short studies in preparation of the Racism Monitor:

In order to prepare a comprehensive Racism Monitor, DeZIM called on scholars* from the DeZIM research community in 2020 to develop innovative study ideas. These should extend existing research projects, pursue new and innovative approaches or build an infrastructure to research racism. By 2021, more than 120 researchers at the six locations of the DeZIM research community had conducted a total of 34 short studies. These are divided into six thematic priorities:

• Health system
• Education system and labour market
• Institutional racism
• Dealing with experiences of racism
• Participation and the media
• Racist ideologies and attitudes

Funding: Federal Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Third-party funding)