The official campaign lasted little more than two weeks, but the unofficial campaign lasted noticeably longer - all political factions were strongly promoting themselves and intensified confrontations with rivals from the beginning of October.

Although during this period there were no editorial pieces about the discriminatory statements issued on live television broadcasts, it is even more interesting to consider that the media platforms have, through their editorial policies, supported such telecasts.

In the context of the campaign, politically incendiary speech and attempts to gather political points can easily cross the boundaries of acceptable and slide into the area of discriminatory, inciting discourse.

What's in the news?

With the goal to get a systematic knowledge about the manner of discourse during the election campaign, GONG and the House of Human Rights have been monitoring media during the election period. They identify election candidates and other actors and media which are publishing unfair, discriminatory and stereotypical statements.

The research was done on six daily newspapers, six weekly newspapers, three central TV news shows, three television talk shows, one live radio show and eight internet news pages. All the media were subjected to monitoring from October 1 to November 13 – thereby monitoring the final period of the informal preliminary election campaign, the official campaign, and also the immediate echo of the parliamentary elections.

Daily dose of discrimination

Contents from every media outlet that was subject of monitoring were involved in the analysis, primarily looking at so-called worldview, value-saturated issues which have an important place in Croatian public discourse and media space.

Five such fields were identified for the research:

• Refugee and migration crisis in Europe
• Gender and political participation
• LGBTIQ individuals and their rights
• Identity and the national minority rights in Croatia
• Historical revisionism and the rehabilitation of the Ustashi (Ustaša) regime

Using these guidelines, the following numbers of published material were found:

• 372 articles from daily newspapers
• 61 articles from weekly newspapers
• 292 articles on internet news pages
• 1 radio show
• 7 episodes of TV talk-shows

The analysis shows that the statements in which stereotypical and discriminatory speech of varying intensity is present appear on an almost daily basis. In many cases, candidates or others being interviewed were responsible for the discriminatory speech, especially during live TV broadcasts.

But in other cases, journalists and editors failed to influence the content or tone, and with their reaction - or the lack there - they gave tacit approval to the words, or even intensified them.

More details are available here.