The Perception of Different Ethnic Groups in the Mass Media of Saint Petersburg

Abstract

Pavel Fadeev – Junior Research Fellow, Department of Studying International Relations, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Address: bld. 5, 24/35, Krzhizhanovskij St., Moscow, 117218, Russian Federation. E-mail: erving45@gmail.com

Previous research on the place of ethnicity issues in the mass media of Saint Petersburg speculates that the mass media in this city aids the formation of specific attitudes towards migrants. To determine whether this is the case, we analyse the media content by means of the Medialogia software package. We identify the following ethnic groups living in Saint Petersburg and study their representation in mass media: Jews, Ukrainians, Tajiks and Chechens. Our primary hypothesis was that older, more integrated ethnic groups (Jews and Ukrainians) are more positively represented in the city’s mass media compared to more recent groups (Tajiks and Chechens). The hypothesis was partly confirmed: the city’s media produces less critical information about Jews, compared to Chechens and Tajiks. The attitude towards Ukrainians was affected by the current crisis in Russian-Ukrainian relations. Moreover, we found that the media representation of an ethnic group is affected by its size and level of integration. A positive factor in affecting the spread of information about an ethnic group and the formation of public stereotypes about it is whether it controls its own mass media. We also found that not all mass media heavily exploit existing ethnic stereotypes: the share of negatively coloured messages accounts roughly for one third of all the messages containing reference to ethnic issues.