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Can journalists mention the nationality of suspects?
While queuing to pay in a bookshop yesterday I noticed the main headline on the Italian national newspaper Corriere della Sera:
'Rape in Rome: they were five, maybe from Eastern Europe. The police are looking for three Romanians'.
I noted down the headline (unfortunately I cannot find it online) because I found it incorrect and dangerous that a journalist mentioned someone's alleged nationality, as generally as 'maybe from Eastern Europe', in a country where immigration is a recent phenomenon and many people are consequently racist and have forgotten how until just a few generations ago Italians themselves had to move abroad looking for work and a place to stay.
Similar stories all had the same tone, and another Italian newspaper I checked went along the same lines.
I looked up the UK National Union of Journalists code of conduct, which states:
'A journalist shall only mention a person's age, race, colour, creed, illegitimacy, marital status (or lack of it), gender or sexual orientation if this information is strictly relevant. A journalist shall neither originate nor process material which encourages discrimination, ridicule, prejudice or hatred on any of the above-mentioned grounds.'
Does that include nationality too?
I looked for comparable regulations in Italy (via Google Italy, limiting the search to web pages from Italy), and could not find a code of conduct for journalists anywhere. There are mentions of a proposed one, but I can hardly believe there is none at the moment. Maybe I just could not find it.
Monday 26 January 2009 at 8:18 PM
Another thing to keep in mind is that journalists don't usually write headlines. Those are often composed by copy editors who have to fit the headline into the space they have. It leads to lots of really horrible (and sometimes inadvertently funny) headlines. That said, I know the issues with Romanians in Italy so it seems pretty inflammatory to me.
Tuesday 27 January 2009 at 7:01 PM
And Corriere della Sera is supposed to be centre, leaning to the left.
This is even worse when it comes to conservative/neo-fascist newspapers:the day Obama was elected, Libero, or was it Il Giornale, ran this headline: "NERO MA STRANO".
I'm not a native speaker, but it does mean "BLACK BUT STRANGE"??
The race issue is a big problem here – everybody behaves like neo-colonialist when foreigners are concerned, the bias are unbelievable. Italy is currently doing (even worse) what the rest of Europe did in the 60s or the 70s in terms of integration of its immigrants, so learning from my experience of France, Germany or the UK, I think that, unfortunately, they should brace for dark times ahead…
Thanks for giving me a platform to say it. At least someone cares.
And I meant to comment on your blog for a long time: I finally do it. Keep up the good job, mi raccomando (OK, try to teach that concept to your husband :-) )