Presentation of the new collection of the SOVA Center

On May 29, 2007, the Independent Press Center hosted a presentation of the new collection of the SOVA Center, “Hate Speech against Society,” completing the next stage of the coalition project to study ethnic and religious intolerance in the media.

The compiler and authors of the book took part in the press conference

Alexander Verkhovsky , director of the SOVA Center;
Galina Kozhevnikova , deputy director of the SOVA Center;
Natalia Ratinova , senior researcher at the Department of Legal Psychology of the Research Institute for Strengthening Law and Order under the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation;
Dmitry Dubrovsky , head of the department of modern ethnography, interethnic relations of the Russian Museum of Ethnography, employee of the European University in St. Petersburg, teacher of the Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Alexander Verkhovsky told reporters about the goals of the project, about the main problems associated with hate speech, which are reflected in the new collection, and drew the attention of those gathered to the fact that a number of problems reflected in the authors in the regional, rather than federal, aspect still relate to all-Russian trends and do not of a local nature.

Galina Kozhevnikova spoke about the main trends in the development of hate speech, which were identified during the last monitoring conducted in September-December 2006 - the ethnicization of the concept of "migrant", the denial of Russian citizenship of a person depending on his ethnicity, the inability to highlight the problem of growth xenophobic violence, the inability of the journalistic community to professionally discuss corporate problems (such as the problem of mentioning ethnicity in criminal chronicles) and provoking the growth of xenophobic publications by government officials at various levels.

Dmitry Dubrovsky drew attention to the fact that the ethnicization of consciousness, which, unfortunately, is characteristic of many Russians, seriously complicates the very discussion about ways to overcome xenophobia. So, for example, publications that representatives of a particular ethnic group are all wonderful people, and therefore the group should immediately be treated well, are no less racist than articles that representatives of the same group are all thieves and bandits. However, if in the latter case everything is more or less obvious, then how to assess the racist potential inherent in such “tolerant” articles? It is intended to be assessed by the methodology that is presented in the new collection and which D. Dubrovsky spoke about.

Natalia Ratinova dwelled on the problems of examining texts, which have already become the object of attention of the prosecutor's office. She emphasized that very often, in the pursuit of advertising, indignation and appeals to the courts and the prosecutor’s office are provoked not even by the journalists themselves, but by the editors of publications, tearing out quotes from seasoned and competent texts, distorting them and thus announcing their publications. However, the difficulty of examinations, she emphasized, also lies in the fact that the expert must evaluate not a specific slogan (text, word), but the context in which this slogan was pronounced, not the formal meaning of the words, but how these words are perceived by others.

Next, the participants of the press conference answered questions from journalists who were interested in the problems of the relationship between the influence of state policy on the level of hate speech in the media, attempts to legislatively limit the mention of ethnicity in criminal episodes, mechanisms of negative stereotyping, etc.