Hate speech was discussed in Vladivostok

On May 12, 2006, within the framework of the project "Counteracting Hate Speech in the Russian Mass Media", a discussion was held in Vladivostok with the participation of representatives of the regional administration, public organizations, ethnic and religious communities and journalists of the Primorsky Territory.

Anna Sevortyan (Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, Moscow), Galina Kozhevnikova (SOVA Center, Moscow ), Mikhail Melnikov (Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, Moscow). Anna Selezneva, representative of the Glasnost Defense Foundation in Vladivostok, spoke about the coverage of interethnic and migration issues in the regional press. head of the regional department of Rosokhrankultura Petr Samoylenko.

A. Selezneva noted that, as in the federal press, the most common type of hate speech in the press of the region is the unmotivated mention of ethnicity in the criminal chronicle, which fixes a brightly colored visual "image of the enemy" in the reader's mind. In addition, she drew attention to the fact that despite the multi-confessional composition of the population of the region, the Primorsky press practically does not pay attention to coverage of events in religious communities, with the exception of the Orthodox. As an example, she cited the widespread coverage by the regional media of the celebration of Orthodox Easter against the backdrop of a complete absence of not only congratulations, but even reports about the celebration of Easter by other Christian communities a week earlier, or information about religious holidays of Muslims.

P. Samoylenko briefly described the situation with the media in the region as a whole, focusing on the problems of their violation of the law, requiring the intervention of Rosokhrankultura. In particular, he said that in January 2006 one of the local ethno-nationalist newspapers had been issued a warning for posting extremist and xenophobic materials on its pages. According to him, control over such publications is difficult because they are published extremely irregularly. In particular, he said that to file a lawsuit to liquidate a publication for promoting extremism and xenophobia, three warnings are needed within a year, but right-wing media sometimes come out so rarely that they simply “do not get” enough warnings. (Actually, in accordance with the 2002 Law "On Counteracting Extremist Activities", one warning is enough, and in the most significant cases it is not required. However, so far there have been no precedents for closing publications "by one warning" - order. )

Representatives of the Muslim community called on journalists to take a more responsible approach in covering such topics as terrorism, since, in their opinion, Islamic religious terms are often used in the media without understanding their exact meaning. As a result, the reader has a distorted idea of Islam as an aggressive dogma, which does not contribute to the maintenance of interfaith peace.

The issue of the influence of the "political situation" on the formation of an ethnically colored image of the enemy or manifestations of imperial great-power chauvinism was discussed (as an example, a representative of the Ukrainian community cited the case of an official announcement of the opening of the consulate of Ukraine in Vladivostok, where the country was called Little Russia, and the whole message was sustained in sarcastically derogatory tone).

In addition, the participants in the discussion noted that they are bewildered by the talk about the "Chinese threat" that has been popular in the federal press lately. In their opinion, with all the complex of problems that Primorye faces, ethnically colored discussions on this topic are the result of an inadequate assessment of the situation in the region and the implementation of goals that have little in common with a constructive solution to these problems.

Finally, issues of responsibility and professionalism of journalists covering various conflicts were raised (the Associated Press standard was cited as an example of journalistic standards), the lack of dialogue between ethnic and religious communities and the media was noted (in particular, the problem of how to make information attractive materials devoted to the promotion of ethnic and confessional diversity and coverage of cultural events organized by these communities), and a number of other issues.

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