Discourses on media portrayals of immigrants and the homeland

If they were to provide an equal flow of information and promote communication among people, the media might be seen as ideal facilitators of a living democracy. However, in today’s media-saturated society with increased access to different media (e.g., minority, transnational, national and local media), claims are being raised that democracy is under threat and that multicultural civil society is tending towards fragmentation, encouraging exclusion rather than inclusion between cultural groups. Do specific cultural readings encourage the formation of, for example, so-called ‘media ghettos’ and/or ‘multiple public sphericules’? The present paper examines how media coverage of migrants and their home country is perceived among migrant families in Sweden. Most research thus far has focused on the media text rather than on media uses and practices. But by applying a mediaethnographic discursive approach, we have directed our attention to the migrants themselves in order to illuminate the complex relationship between different readings of certain media texts. Of importance is attaining knowledge about the role of the media in migrants’ perception of Swedish society and “Swedes”, but also about how one looks at oneself as a migrant. The study shows that there are close interconnections between specific media readings and the perception of, for example, dominating discourses in society related to immigration. Several key issues are discussed among the informants in order to confirm cultural affiliations such as the search for the ‘truth’ and media objectivity, seeking alternative portrayals of reality from transnational media (e.g., AlJazeera). Other topics raised are cultural imperialism, non-ethical Western journalism in terms of lifestyle, values and violence, but also the need to belong to a national mediated public sphere. The paper shows that, despite predominantly critical voices about media coverage, media use is not only a matter of minority and diasporic media displacing local and national media, but rather that the informants prefer to use a mixture of different media.