Media and Minorities

184
Georg Ruhrmann
In sum, these four types of television news coverage of people with immigrant
backgrounds constitute different journalistic strategies for representing
integrative and disintegrative aspects of immigration. At the same time,
they depict different long-term, social and political patterns of discourse in
Germany. Since they deal with the subjects of immigration, integration, and
disintegration in very different ways, one cannot speak of the journalists or
the news media.
On the Role of Contact Shown in the Media
(Parasocial Contact Hypothesis)
For some time, social psychologists have discussed the role that contact between
minorities and majorities plays in integration. Studies in communications
and social psychology have shown that the media’s reporting can create
a type of media or virtual contact, whose impact is similar to that of real,
interpersonal contact.22 This finding is significant for rural regions where,
studies of central and eastern Germany show, immigrants and native-born
Germans have less real contact with one another.23 As with other findings of
social scientific research, however, participants in the current political debate
are only beginning to take it into account. (I’ll take this up in part 4.)
Contact can decrease prejudice when members of the different groups in
contact have approximately equal status and cooperate in their pursuit of
common goals.24 The content and quantity of television that a person watches
influences how the person evaluates natives and immigrants. When tele vision
portrays immigrants in contact with members of the host society, viewers
tend to assess them more positively. The same is true for television news: when
it explicitly shows contact25 between natives and immigrants, viewers sometimes
evaluate the immigrants portrayed more positively than when no contact
is shown.26 Reporting that depicts such contact also includes significantly
less violence than reporting that does not.
22 See Edward Schiappa, Peter B. Gregg, and Dean E. Hewes, “The Parasocial Contact Hy-
Communication Monographs 72, no. 1 (2005): 92–115.
23 See Ulrich Wagner et al., “Ethnic Prejudice in East and West Germany,” Group Processes
& Intergroup Relations 6, no. 1 (2003): 22–36.
24 See Schiappa et al., “The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis.”
25 See Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Perseus Book, 1954), 262–281;
see also Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp, “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup
Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, no. 5 (2006): 751–783.
26 See Sommer, “Framing und Kontaktinformation” and Gunnar Lenner, Meta-Analytic
Evaluations of Interventions to Improve Ethnic Attitudes (Marburg: Philipps-Universität
Marburg, 2011).
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