Migrant Tales has written a lot about how the Finnish media writes about migrants, asylum seekers, and our ever-growing culturally diverse society. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem of the Finnish media, when it writes about migrants and minorities, is that it gives white Finland the benefit of the doubt.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this because the national media is white.
By giving the police service, the Red Cross, and other institutions in Finland the benefit of the doubt, the media believes what they say even if it has doubts.
A good example of the latter is how the Finnish media handled growing hate speech, xenophobia and the rise of an anti-immigration party, the Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, before the 2011 parliamentary elections.
It appeared that the rise of a party like the PS, which based its campaign on populist nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric, delighted many representatives of the Finnish media because the party reinforced their prejudices and bigotry.
Even so, one may ask how newspapers like Helsingin Sanomat, which should know better, could journalists like Saska Saarikoski be misled into believing that PS MEP Jussi Halla-aho, who was sentenced for ethnic agitation, is a “champion of free speech?”
Continue reading “Finland, asylum seekers and the media: Moral cowardice and passing the buck”
