Erjavec, Karmen (2001).  Media Representation of the Discrimination against the Roma in Eastern Europe:  The Case of Slovenia.  Discourse & Society, 12(6), 699-727.

Erjavec examines how discourse can perpetuate discriminatory views of a population through a critical discourse analysis of how the Roma were represented in Slovenian newspapers during the fall of 1997.  She takes a macro-level approach to understand why the Roma would be described in a negative light through a historical analysis of the conditions in Eastern Europe that breed discrimination against the Roma and the media’s role in Slovenia.  She looks at the role of journalistic conventions in the production of discriminatory discourse.  Erjavec breaks each article down into its headline and lead; the story, which is broken into a situation, an episode and background; and finally the article’s commentary, which includes verbal reactions and conclusions.  She uncovers how each part of the article is laden with stereotypical views of the ”other.”  Critical Discourse Analysis also assumes there are power relations intrinsic to the construction of discourse that legitimate one ideology and delegitimate opposing views.

Erjavec’s analysis explains the important role of the environment within which reporters work and its influence on their reporting.  The article also provides a method for looking at how discourse perpetuates stereotypes through a dissection of specific statement within a news article and by linking these statements to journalistic conventions.  An understanding of how the “other” is stereotyped is important to understanding how conflict reporting is biased and why this could be problematic even when one side is clearly committing atrocities that should be condemned.

Abstract by Meghan Maskery

Missouri School of Journalism

MA ‘07