Human rights

Media violating rights

Source

Informing about Roma community in Slovakia is an important human rights issue in relation to the media. Analysis of media outputs of the Slovak journalists revealed the fact that authors do not try to stifle the stereotypes and prejudices and very often even build their outputs and outcomes on the stereotypes, not trying to look deeper inside the problem to find its causes. Very often they use emotive valuations, which, after reading, hearing or watching, imply that all the Romas wear no shoes and that they all live in excrements and are all the same. The phrase “human dignity” is often unknown to these authors and an inability to show other perspectives and causes of the problem is evident.

If they wanted to they could explain that Romas are a very heterogeneous social group, that most of them are assimilated and do not live in colonies, and that the majority shares the responsibility for the situation of the Romas.

One good illustrative example of the problems mentioned above is the fact, that when analysis compared various outputs, it revealed that the most outputs were taken in the same few colonies and there was only one barefoot child shown in different outputs evoking that all the Roma kids have no shoes. The next example is the way media report on developing countries - when they show “Africa” as one country full of starvation, unhappiness and illnesses.

This approach is really dangerous and does the complete opposite of what the media should do - it strengthens the prejudices, instead of fighting them.