Migration, diversity and inclusion in media: A self-learning guide
1. Introduction
The media is often called the mirror of society, and in many ways it is.
What is reflected in the mirror and how true that image ultimately is, depends on many factors as well of us viewers: for example, what kind of values, life experiences, social status or religious and cultural backgrounds we have.
In other words, it is almost impossible to find, or to provide, a 100% unbiased, fully objective reflection or reporting of what is happening around us – or to us. Maybe instead, we should focus more on our abilities to critically consume and interpret different types of content, to be able to spot the bias, to see when the content is genuinely impartial, or when the motivation behind is to touch our emotions and influence our behavior.
When the media content is responsibly done, diverse, and critically consumed, it can truly help us to better understand different realities, different people and the society around us – and ultimately help in understanding ourselves too.
We should be able to look at the media content – and ourselves as the content consumers – with both an open mind and a critical eye. This requires knowledge, especially now, in the age of artificial intelligence, when creating authentically looking false and misleading content is easier than ever before.
This short self-learning guide is targeted primarily to young adults, but also to everyone else, who wishes to learn more about diversity, inclusion and migration in the media. To support your learning, we have put together a summary of different open and free resources and online training courses, as well as some tips and food for thought to use for self-reflection.
Enjoyable exploration!
Why does fair, accurate and
responsible media matter?
When we talk about the media in this guide, we use the broad meaning of media including the conventional media, social media and different online platforms. When necessary, we are trying to differentiate between the journalistic media, professionally produced communications and other media platforms (e.g. social media), where all users have the opportunity to produce content and engage with others.
Communications is crucial, not just for our social life, but also in the societal level. For democracy to truly function, different groups of people should be able to engage in public debate, to face each other, to share views, and to have enough accurate information to hold the decision-makers accountable. Media, as the platform for information sharing, discussion and debate, can as its best embrace, and on its worst hinder, described democratic participation.
Studies also show that media content on migration and refugees has a significant impact on public opinion and political decision-making. Despite the rise of social media, the conventional journalistic media (like the tv-news or newspapers) still actively direct our views about society. Media content plays a crucial role in forming our understanding of prevailing population relations – and ultimately may affect our behavior towards other people.
2. Understanding migration
When people migrate they move to a new place of residence. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Migration truly is a very normal human activity that has happened as long as there has been people.
At the same time, migration is complex social and societal phenomena that shapes communities, societies and geopolitical relations. Migration can be voluntary or involuntary and can occur for a variety of different reasons, including economic, political, environmental and social issues.
In the end, each individual story of migration is somehow different. At the same time it’s a human experience that has the power to connect us globally.
The vast majority of people continue to live in the countries in which they were born. According to International Organization for Migration (IOM) there were 281 million migrants in 2020. This means that only 3,6 percent of total world population migrates to another country.
In order to understand what is true and what is not about migration, and to critically view any media content handling it, it’s good to learn more about migration as a social phenomena as well as about migration as a human experience.
To get the figures right, we’ll recommend checking out IOM’s World Migration Report 2022. The link takes you to the interactive report page where you’ll find visualizations of migration data. The Migration Data Portal is another good source, providing you with a deeper dive into global migration statistics.
If you like to learn by watching videos, we recommend you to check out the educational content from Migration Matters. Migration Matters has produced several engaging and easily understandable video series on migration with diverse migration experts.
Introduction to Migration 101 with Dr. Hein de Haas, produced and published in 2017, still provides valuable insights to migration. The series can also help those, who didn’t live through the so called “2015 refugee crisis in Europe”, to better understand the current political debates.
The opportunities and possibilities to migrate aren’t, or haven’t been, equal or always voluntary, which is good to keep in mind when trying to understand migration as a social phenomena. Migration is also a fluid phenomena, as migrants can be “voluntary” in one moment and “forced’” the next.
To serve as food for thought, we are here providing you with few sources describing very different individual experiences of moving. It’s good to remember that a person’s identity and roles are always multidimensional. Therefore no one should be categorized solely based on the fact that they did move to another place.
Australia is many times called the nation of migrants, as about 30% of people living in Australia had been born overseas (2020). The National Archives of Australia have published a collection of Migration Stories consisting of archive pictures accompanied with very diverse migrant stories and information about the different historical stages of migration. It’s also a good collection to understand the impact of discriminative migration policies Australia used to have.
Equally, the online materials produced by the Museum of Migration in Paris, shed light on, for example, how thousands of Spanish people migrated to France in search of better life. Peeking into past, can many times provide us with the needed new angle into contemporary discussion.
If you are into video games, it may be worth testing the award-winning Path Out, an autobiographical narrative adventure game that allows the players to replay the journey of Abdullah Karam, a young Syrian artist that escaped the civil war in 2014. Abdullah was 18 years old when he left Syria. You can access the game here for free.
Last but not least, we’ll recommend a(n online) visit to District 6 in Cape Town, South Africa. Before apartheid, District 6 was ethnically, culturally, socially, and religiously a very diverse and vibrant community consisting of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, laborers and immigrants.
During the apartheid regime, this kind of diversity became a problem, and in 1966 District 6 was declared a white area. In the end, 60 000 people were forcibly removed to Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers.
Decades after, some of the families have been able to return. Zahra Nordien is one of them, and you can listen her story by BBC World.
How media covers migration?
There are several good international reports written about migration in media, and it is hard to recommend just one for reading. We would love to say, that read many. But here comes one, the Moving Stories produced by the Ethical Journalism Network. The Moving Stories was chosen because it provides an international review of how media covers migration, and the report is translated into several different languages.
3. Diversity and inclusion (in media)
Diversity is a broad concept that can be understood as a human variety, that we are all somehow different compared to others. In this self-learning guide, we talk about diversity meaning the differences we have based on our cultural background, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.
Diversity can also be seen as a positive practice. It’s about involving people from a wide range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, and respecting and appreciating what makes us different.
In the beginning we spoke about democracy. For democracy to truly function, different groups of people should be able to engage in public debate, to face each other, to share views, and to have enough accurate information to hold the decision-makers accountable.
For this reason, media diversity is an important goal. Media diversity ensures that a wide range of voices and perspectives, including those from marginalized communities and minority groups, are heard and represented. It also includes the idea of having diverse content creators, journalists, and media outlets, who take on different topics and can engage with different communities and groups of people.
Promoting diversity is important, but doesn’t come without risks. If we highlight, for example, too much of our cultural and religious differences, we may end up reinforcing the confrontation between people, which can lead to growing polarization (= division into sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs). For this reason, functioning democracy also comes with an idea of tolerating some difference in views and ideas we disagree with.
Before moving on to discuss inclusion, let’s take a moment to embrace connection and experiences that can unite us, despite our differences. Enjoy watching this short film called All That We Share, produced by the Danish TV 2.
As discussed above, diversity focuses on representation, making sure that all are involved, when inclusion is about sense of belonging – it is about creating fair spaces, like the media platforms, where diverse people feel included, respected, and understood.
Inclusive media narratives, the stories we consume, reflect the complexity of human experiences with empathy, and tell stories with people (not just about them). Inclusive narratives are also bold in a respectful manner – painful points, critical aspects or challenges are not hidden away, but instead there’s effort to understand and to increase understanding about them.
For journalistic media and communications companies inclusion also means that they should have recruitment structures and human resource policies in place for making sure that members of minority groups have equitable career opportunities and working conditions.
Wishing to go deeper?
The Global Migration Media Academy provides several free online courses which start from the beginner level. If you wish to dive deeper and learn more about migration in the context of media and communications, have a look at these courses.
4. What lenses am I wearing?
Have you sometimes stopped to think, why some content triggers strong emotions or feels unfair or totally wrong, and why some are passed by with less emotions? Or why after reading or watching something we feel somehow empowered: “I knew that I got this right”?
As brought up in the beginning, what we actually see in the content we consume, depends on many factors like, for example, what kind of values, life experiences, social status, or educational, religious and cultural backgrounds we have. In other words, we all see the world through our own lenses, and the more aware we are about them, the better we become in understanding diversity, and spotting also misinformation and disinformation.
To tune up our ability for critical thinking and self-reflection, we need to learn about two concepts that are privilege and unconscious/implicit bias. Both of these concepts can help us to understand better our own position in the society, as well as to recognize our reactions.
What is Privilege? video (here below) is based on a Privilege Walk exercise which is widely used in human rights education, peace education, and global citizenship education, and you can find several variations of it online. The questions used for making this video, can be found in the description field (when you open the video in YouTube).
In case you got interested in looking the question of privilege deeper, try out the Wheel of Privilege. The link takes you to the version developed by a Canadian teacher, Sylvia Duckworth, but again, there are several variations of the wheel you can find online (also some that could be adapted to your country). The further you are from power on the wheel, the more marginalized and powerless you are – and vice versa.
The next video by the Diversity Campus explains the concept of implicit or unconscious bias, why do we have it and how does it impact us. We all have biases, prejudice or inclination for or against someone or something, and some of these biases are so deep in our thinking and behavior, that we may be blind to them.
When we speak about these ”unconscious” biases, we talk about implicit bias. Becoming more aware of our own implicit biases helps us to critically view our interpretations of different media content. It will also help us to understand, and to develop, our reactions and behavior in social media.
How to get started with identifying own implicit biases? There are plenty of resources for identifying implicit bias, and this Harvard Business Review article by Carmen Acton can be a good starting point (not academic, but a very pleasant read, don’t be scared).
Harvard University has also developed online tests for assessing implicit biases. In case you are interested in trying out the Implicit Association Test (the results are used for research), you can find the tests on the following websites:
5. How to create (and recognize) better stories?
Last, but not least, we wish to provide you with some practical tips on how to get started in practice. These tips are useful for making your own content, but also for estimating and analyzing the content you consume on different media. Getting good takes a bit of effort, but it’s certainly worth it!
Truly know the topic
Doing the research well, using several sources and taking a bit of time to analyze the findings, goes a long way. If you can put the topic in a context (understand the specific environment, time, and events that affect the situation and experiences), your ability to understand what really happens, rises on a different level.
Additionally, when you know your topic well, you can ask better questions, and you will know if everything isn’t quite right in the story. It’s also good to note, that every person’s personal experience is valuable as an experience, but doesn’t necessarily provide accurate information about what happened, or reflect the experience of a larger group of people.
Practice empathy
In simple terms empathy is our attempt and ability to understand others. In the context of stories, the reader or viewer needs to be able to put themselves in the various peoples’ shoes and understand what they’re experiencing on a personal level.
Good journalism and communications requires empathetic understanding alongside ethical and pragmatic considerations. Try to focus on understanding the people in the story, even if you disagree with their action or opinions.
Learn how to identify and challenge your own biases
Identifying biases requires honest self-reflection, practice and openness towards learning new, but offers also a great opportunity for personal development. Remember that biases are not always negative, they can be positive as well.
Practice to use the counter-speech approach
Counter-speech has been proposed as a more effective approach to challenging online hate compared to blocking or removing content, or for example trying to explain why aggressive talk is wrong or harmful.
Counter-speech directly presents an alternative, polite and non-aggressive response to whatever has been posted. If you are interested in learning more, take a closer look for example the Dangerous Speech Project’s website and resources.
Use fact-checking and verification tools
Migration is a good theme or topic for creating and spreading misinformation and disinformation. Luckily, there are many free resources available for verifying content.
You can use e.g. TinEye for verifying images and InVid for videos. To get a good overall understanding of deepfakes and how to spot them, this article by the Guardian offers a good starting point. The Fact-checking Network’s list of actors provide also a list of actors who monitor media content around the globe.