Building Bridges Conference
Ambassador William R. Timken, Jr.
Berlin, March 13, 2007
State Secretary Altmaier, students and journalists, thank you all for taking the time to attend this conference.
This conference means a lot to me. Last fall, my wife Sue and I had a conversation with a group of high school students. We invited them to our home to meet with several of our good acquaintances from different immigrant communities in Berlin.
These young people told us that one of the things they find most frustrating is the way in which they are presented in the German media. They felt that the only time young people from immigrant backgrounds were featured in the news, it was in the context of a story about crime or school violence. They said that they felt that there weren’t enough positive stories about members of their communities. This made it seem like it would be impossible for them to succeed in life.
In the United States, a lot of work has been done on the way immigrants and minority groups are presented in the media and the impact on people’s perceptions. This applies to the perceptions of society as a whole but it also applies to how members of a particular ethnic or minority group see themselves. What we think about people has a lot to do with how we see them. What we see is sometimes only what the popular culture and the news media show us -- unless we make a special effort to look harder and deeper.
So much of media these days is based on visuals. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Television and newspapers have to be particularly attentive to the subtle messages they convey to their audiences through images. Several years ago, a group of employees at CNN commented to the network’s management that the footage used as background for stories on poverty and crime focused heavily on African-Americans. When network managers investigated, they found that, in fact, the background footage on these topics featured only African-Americans. What did they do about it? The footage was discarded. New background footage was produced, which depicted a much more realistic range of Americans. Network management also worked with their employees to develop a video to illustrate how pervasive and insidious racial biases can be. They made the video required viewing as part of an in-house training program on this issue.
Although the population of the United States is very different from that of Germany, questions about bias and how various groups are portrayed in the media are universal. This is an issue that gets to the heart of the self-esteem and self-perception of young people, regardless of their background. It is not an easy issue to confront. It requires an ongoing evaluation of story content, images, and the overall balance of stories presented. It requires resolve on the part of the publishers, producers, and editors who decide which stories to develop and where to feature them.
Ideally, it should also involve dialogue and conversations like the ones you are having today.
I would like to thank you all for making the time to take part in this discussion. I hope that it is productive. If it helps you, the students, and you, the journalists here today, understand each other just a little bit better, then this conference will be a success. There is one important message that I hope all of us will take away with us after this day is over. The message is: Critical thinking. Never forget to think critically about the news you read, watch, write, and broadcast. Make that special effort to look harder and closer and always to ask questions.
