ON SEPTEMBER 7th 2015, a few days after Germany decided to open its borders to tens of thousands of asylum-seekers who were stranded on their migration route into Europe, the management of TV Prima, a Czech television station, called a meeting with its news team. The network had been presenting a mix of stories on the migrants, sometimes portraying the difficulties they caused for European countries, sometimes their own suffering and hopes. But at the meeting, a senior editor and board member ordered the journalists to portray the refugees exclusively as a danger. “The custom here is that the broadcast management is God, and one just doesn’t talk back to God,” TV Prima’s editor-in-chief, Jitka Obzinova, says in an audio recording of the meeting.
“The message was, we will not be objective, we have to push the politics and close the border. Migrants are a mass of people, not individuals,” says one journalist who was present. “It was against all codes of journalism.”
It is hardly news that most media in the Czech Republic, as elsewhere in central and eastern Europe, took a sensationalist anti-immigrant line during the refugee crisis. What was striking...Continue reading
Souce: Europe http://ift.tt/2cqrV9z
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