• by IPS Correspondents (bonn)
• Wednesday, December 14, 1994
• Inter Press Service

BONN, Dic 14 (IPS) - The media could contribute a lot to the creation of mutual understanding between Europeans and foreigners if they did not put their focus on floods and disasters in the Third World, said a European Union expert here, Wednesday.

"The problem is that a lopsided image of the Third World countries is associated with that of foreigners, as projected in the German and European media," said Uta Wuerfel, a member of the European Commission Against Racism and Xenophobia.

Wuerfel, who chairs the commission's Working Group on Information, Communication and Media, said this in turn helped set the attitudes of average Europeans towards "human beings who look different," or have different colour skins to themselves.

Germany has seen a series of sometimes murderous assaults on foreigners in the four years since the country's reunification.

The worst affected were people seeking refuge from war or other physical threat, she said and the denigrating expression used in Germany -- 'Asylanten' -- reflected deep rooted prejudice.

Much responsibility for this state of affairs lay with the media, both the popular tabloids and the so-called quality press, said Wuerfel, a member of Germany's liberal FDP party headed by Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel.

"The first and the most significant responsibility of journalists lies in professionalism," said Wuerfel, Germany's representative on the 19-person consultative commission headed by France's Jean Kahn, president of the European Jewish Congress.

"It is indeed an obvious lack of journalistic professionalism combined with missing ethical norms in large sections of today's European media that is compounding the problem (of racism in the media)."

The comments provoked an angry response among some reporters attending a news conference here. But Wuerfel said she was aware that journalists who work according to ethical principles, "often get into serious conflict with publishers, directors-general and editors who wish to compete on the media market".

Wuerfel, a former member of Germany's federal parliament, was presenting an interim report of the commission's work since its was constituted last September.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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