MEDIA INFLUENCES ON FREEDOM OF RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS MINORITIES

Paper presented by Camillo Maffia at the Side Event organized by Soteria International at the OSCE meeting (Warsaw, 2013)

In Italy, equal opportunities are not always guaranteed by media, and several forms of media stigmatization occur in the ethnic and religious field. For instance, we often assist to offensive and discriminating representations of the Roma minorities, depicted as a sort of security trouble; in the same way, Jehova’s Witnesses are often depicted as a dangerous, destructive cult in TV specials, without giving their representatives any chance to defend themselves or to tell the painful story of their religious movement; even the deportation by the Nazis of both minorities is not acknowledged.

Worldwide experts talk about “moral panic” especially about new religious movements: media social alarm about thousands of dangerous cults is mainly unreal in a country where only 2.5% of the population belongs to religious minorities, according to CESNUR. This moral panic is mainly spread by the media, like the moral panic about Islam spread after the 11/9 tragedy, which luckily faded due to the absence of new terroristic attacks the Western world feared in those years, although forms of media stigmatization still interest the Islam minority in our country.

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