11. 07. 2005

LACK OF JOURNALISTIC SENSIBILITY TO SENSITIVE ISSUES

However, occasional examples can be found that show how the media pay little or no attention to some sensitive situations targeted at representatives of minorities, regardless of whether they are homosexual couples, ethnic groups, AIDS victims or members of minority religious organizations. In this sense, Croatian media are still trapped by sensationalism and unfair presentation of particular events; as a rule, their bias is damaging for the members of minority groups. Thus, hate speech appears less often, but excess situations especially in post-conflict, troubled areas such as Vukovar, show that journalists and editors (ab)use ethnic background. By stressing ethnic background, regardless of the nature of the crime (if any), the journalist or the editor a priori accuses other members of the particular ethnic minority. Of course, one cannot claim that this is the kind of articles that promotes hate speech, but one can conclude that the final outcome of the reader’s experience is the following: “Look at what they (the minority) are doing to us (the majority)”. There are quite a number of such instances, but instead of labeling them as hate speech, it is much fairer to label them as being politically incorrect. The aim of this paper is to give a short description of the current situation and instances in which one can find unfair reporting in the media bordering on hate speech and yet, they are not hate speech in the real sense of the word. At least, they are not hate speech in the form that hate speech had in the nineties. There have been changes towards fairer and better reporting. However, can we actually be satisfied today? Short Genesis of Hate Speech The war circumstances in the nineties brought, both to politics and to the media, a new concept: hate speech. Zarko Puhovski, chairman of the Croatian Helsinki Council, states in the introduction to the book Forging the War by Mark Thompson that the beginning of hate speech was marked by total silence, and says: “At the very beginning – at least in our (post-communist, post-Yugoslav, etc.) case – there must have been silence. Silence which – as was later proven by reconstruction – had been hiding decades of hatred. Only if this is taken into account, it can be clearly understood that such a widely used interpretation of ‘hate speech’ as one of the vital hypotheses of the post-Yugoslav war, was possible as a form of resistance to the longstanding silence.” Let us recall the definition of hate speech. It is “all kinds of speech that disseminate, incite or justify national and racial intolerance, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, religious and other forms of hatred based on intolerance.” The definition is completely transparent. Without any doubt, it indicates the worst forms of verbal aggression towards those who are in minority by any criteria or who are different. Examples of hate speech in Croatian media experience have been different and one can tentatively define three stages after 1990: the first stage – genuine form of hate speech (1990-1997); the second stage – the beginning of concern to lessen the intensity and perniciousness of hate speech in the media (1997-2000), and the third stage from 2000 until today which represents a significant fading away of hate speech, i.e. more frequent occurrence of politically incorrect speech in the media when minorities are concerned. Genuine Form of Hate Speech: 1990-1997 Many still feel ill at ease when remembering the beginning of the war in Croatia in 1991 and a little bit later in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Huge destruction, enormous numbers of refugees and displaced persons, destroyed families, the missing and killed and, finally, the bizarre fate of the media. Such was the framework which gave rise to hate speech that was primarily directed at the members of the Serbian national minority. Similar language was also used in 1993, but this time against the members of the Bosniak national minority. In some papers of extreme right political orientation with minor circulations, such as Tomislav, Hrvatsko Slovo or Narod, constructions of hate speech characteristic of the nineties can be found, such as: “the Serbian code of dishonor as a special code of moral values in which a lie, boastfulness, perfidious killing, looting, theft or rape are considered honorable deeds … and which were rooted in the Serbian national being.” The scary part of the whole issue is that some of these papers were subsidized by the Croatian government. Of course, all Croatian papers, both private and state owned, feature a number of instances of promotion of hate speech. The broadcasting of Croatian public television about events from Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts will be remembered. The members of the “Bosniak people were labeled ‘balija’ , ‘mujahedins’, ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘Islamic fanatics’.” Today, twelve years later, then chairman of the Croatian Helsinki Council Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, remembering the time of media promotion of hate speech against Bosniaks, says: “It was a powerful vocabulary of hatred and fear so it does not come as a surprise that Muslims did not leave their houses for a few days at a time after each of these television broadcasts from Bosnia.” Next to intolerant language referring to national minorities that Croatia was in conflict with, the same language was used against all those who expressed any form of critical opinions about the new Croatian state: from “hejslavenci” to “extremely communist media storm troopers”. It is interesting to note that along with Serbians and Bosniaks, Jews were also the target of hate speech!? The first, intensive period of hate speech in Croatian media did not bypass members of different religious groups or sects. The Catholic priest Ante Bakovic writes: “I invite … all honorable and decent Croatians to be aggressive to such sects, to treat them as leprosy. I give them the status of parasites or tumors. It is the same as when a healthy organism has a tumor; the tumor must be removed immediately in order not to infect the whole organism. Thus, I give them the status of leprosy, epidemic, parasites; we should not start discussions with them …” The above illustrations show how intense was the period of hate speech in Croatian media. The majority of media analysts would probably agree that such a period of harsh hate speech never occurred in the media again. Of course, there have been sporadic cases. This is exactly why it is important to stress what it actually is, when writing about today’s possible occurrences of hate speech in Croatian media, and how each media outlet that is concerned with its credibility and that honors its readers is watchful about its vocabulary and utterance in all newspaper forms. The sad side of the issue is that in eight years, not one of the government members has seriously reacted to such occurrences, except for non-government organizations dedicated to media freedom and professional standards. Among the latter, we should mention the Croatian Helsinki Council, Croatian Journalists’ Association, Civic Initiative for Freedom of the Public Word, and a number of international organization that were operating in Croatia at the time. Croatian Government against Speech of Intolerance: 1997-2000 Saturation with speech of intolerance finally provoked the reaction of the authorities in 1997. Namely, in October 1997, the Croatian government sent an appeal to the media in which it called for “use of speech based on tolerance, moderation and cohabitation.” By issuing the appeal, the Government actually publicly acknowledged that some media outlets had caused huge evil by promoting speech of intolerance that had become counterproductive for Croatian policies, forgetting that at the beginning of the nineties the Government itself had issued suggestions and instructions on how the media should write. The respected Croatian journalist Bozo Novak commented on the then Government appeal: “The authorities were the main supporter of intolerance and state-owned media could only follow them. It seems that the Government is interested in tolerance only as a short-term program to enable the leaving of UNTAES in the scheduled term, and not as a constitutional obligation upon which Croatia is based.” The appeal and the public acknowledgment of many, including some editors-in-chief , that they have sometimes promoted intolerance, opened a new page in relation to hate speech. The number of articles that used to promote intolerance diminished and critical comments in reaction to unwise statements by Croatian politicians appeared regularly. Along with reports about ethnic minorities, especially about members of the Roma group, the media also reported about homosexuals using a lot of unacceptable stereotypes in this second, “soft” stage. Sophisticated Intolerance in the Media: 2001-2005 The change that took place at the end of the nineties was that intolerance was no longer exclusively targeted at the members of particular ethnic minorities, but was evenly distributed among all minority social groups. Furthermore, intolerant speech moved from the domestic politics section to all sections in the newspaper: culture, sports and crime. The Croatian Helsinki Council regularly monitors the media and annually evaluates occurrences, intensity and consequences of intolerance and hate speech in society. In this sense, a difference should be made between hate speech as a specific rhetoric of a particular, small group of individuals in relation to its media coverage. In fact, the role of the media is to report about an event and also to mention the use of unacceptable speech. But this does not mean that journalists, in doing so, participate in promoting intolerance. The role of the media is to report about an event correctly, in an unbiased and balanced way, using quotations which, of course, need not be civilized and are then a sign of intolerance. In such instances, every journalist or editor should, simultaneously with the report, write a critical commentary on the harmfulness and unacceptability of the declaration, especially if it comes from a high ranked politician or military officer. Thence, the role of journalism is not to deny an event, but to react to it. What about cases when intolerant declarations have the form of readers’ letters? Unreserved publication of readers’ letters can be counterproductive if it promotes unacceptable tones of hatred. It can, among other things, be understood as tacit agreement of the newsroom, which further asks for additional caution. It is an evil practice, a case of which has been mentioned in the document Media Picture of Croatia issued by the Croatian Helsinki Council: “An illustration of this is a letter by the Dominican priest Jozo Cirak from Split, published in Slobodna Dalmacija in April 24, 2001, in which the mentioned priest attacks Dragan Lukic from the Coalition of Youth Associations from Split, saying: ‘He calls Split, who he claims is 'his', a 'Godforsaken hole'. If he prefers to live in Belgrade or Nis or somewhere else in Serbia, and if that is his 'Florida', let him go there and live in his homeland. I hope that young Croats, especially young Catholics, shall not take the bait of provocation and agree to anti-Croatian demonstrations that the Serbian Lukic is convening. I am asking the youth in Split, as well as the municipal authorities: Is there not a single, young Croatian intellectual who would be able to lead the cultural life of young Croatians and therefore it must be lead by a Serb? By the way, they have already taken over a lot of things. We should block them.” Is There Hate Speech in Croatian Media? Today, at the beginning of 2005, there is no hate speech in Croatian media in the form that we could see and experience in the nineties. There are instances of politically incorrect speech in sporadic cases when media treat minority groups in a wrong, stereotyped way. Newspapers offer headlines such as “Albanian man raped Roma woman” and it is actually a Macedonian citizen who raped a Macedonian female citizen, i.e. this is what the article reads. In order to make a reader read the article, such an “attractive” headline is used. This, of course, is not a case of hate speech, but it is absolutely unfair to those involved in the article. The next example is an event that happened last year in Vukovar, when a bomb was thrown at the club terrace of the Croatian Party of the Law. Already the first editions of the majority dailies published the full names and surnames of the suspects, with Serbian national background next to the name of each suspect. The investigation in the next few days showed that two attackers were wrongly accused, but their names were no longer accompanied by their ethnic background. During a discussion with experienced journalists from leading Croatian dailies at a workshop on media ethics that focused on the mistakes committed and the damage inflicted on the two individuals from Vukovar involved in the event, the following comment was very surprising: “Why should we leave out the ethnic background next to the names of the suspects if it sells the paper? The readers want to know who attacked whom in Vukovar, all the more so because Vukovar is de facto a divided city and no one has any illusions that in the near future ethnic background will be of no importance.” Unfortunately, all additional explanations met with strong opposition and refusal of some of the journalists. The journalists should not have, at their own risk, passed judgment before the investigation was over and stressed the ethnic background of the suspects because they are Croatian citizens. Besides, Croatia adopted the Law on Protection of Personal Information last year; according to the law, it is prohibited, except in exceptional cases, to collect data about the ethnicity, religious beliefs, membership in trade unions, sexual life and data about criminal and offence proceedings. It is obvious that journalists and the majority of public do not know about the provisions of this law. If they did, we would not be faced with a total lack of journalistic sensibility to the sensitive issues of a person’s ethnic background or sexual orientation. This ignorance leads to a lot of unfairness in reporting, especially about the Roma and Serbs. The cases that we see, listen to or read about are not cases of hate speech. They are a sign of a state of sickness of society. According to Thomas Bauer, the media can help to overcome such a state; the media should have the key role in “critical reflection of society…as tools of cultural catharsis, when society restores or re-establishes itself.” Using Bauer’s dictum, we could say that Vukovar, Banovina and Knin are Croatian risky post-conflict areas that are burdened by lack of a communication culture and that each, unexpected case reminds anew that speech of intolerance exists in Croatia. We do not dare to make far-reaching conclusions in this paper because such a task would require a much more detailed analysis of newspaper articles over a longer period of time and using a representative sample of daily and weekly newspapers in order to find out the exact degree of unfair, intolerant and irritant language that appears in Croatian media. However, based on persistent monitoring of newspapers and public television, it is true that the media in Croatia do not promote hate speech today. Recent clashes with handball fans that came to an international handball match in Zagreb showed that Croatian media did not spare either the Croatian or the Serbian fans. What is more, professional sports comments and, especially critically intoned commentaries point at fair and balanced reporting. Although this is highly encouraging, it does not mean that Croatian media have once and for all freed themselves of politically incorrect speech. Sources and Literature - Bauer, B. Thomas: “The Culture of Diversity” (ed. S. Malovic), in The Wealth of Diversity, University Bookstore, ICEJ and OSCE, Zagreb, 2004 - Biagi, Shirley and Kern-Foxworth Marilyn: Facing Difference: Race, Gender and Mass Media, Pine Forge Press, Thousands Oaks, London, 1997 - Hate Speech, published in The Regional Herald for Promotion of Culture of Minority Groups and Inter-ethnic Tolerance, no. 2, September 2004, STINA, Media Plan Institute and School of Journalism from Novi Sad, Split, Sarajevo and Zagreb. - Malovic, Stjepan; Ricchiardi, Sherry; and Vilovic, Gordana: Ethics in Journalism, Izvori, Zagreb, 1998 - The Right to Diversity, (ed. Boro Kontic), Media Centar – Sarajevo, European Center for War, Peace and the News Media, Westminster Foundation and Freedom Forum, Sarajevo, 2000 - Sansevic, Ivana “The New Robes of Hate Speech in the Media: When the Public Fails” in The Identity, no. 82, January 2005, Zagreb - Vilovic, Gordana “Improvement, but Prejudices are still Visible” (ed. S. Malovic) in The Wealth of Diversity, University Bookstore, ICEJ and OSCE, Zagreb, 2004 - Vilovic, Gordana: “The Media, Ethics and National Minorities” in The Public and Minorities: (ed. Stojan Obradovic), STINA, Split, 2004 Gordana Vilovic is Program Coordinator for the International Center of Education of Journalists in Opatija/Zagreb and Lecturer in Journalism Ethics at the Faculty of Political Science Journalism Studies.