De usynlige indvandrere - En analyse af tre danske dagblades kildebrug

Abstract

The key notions which this report evolves around are the mass media’s democratic responsibility and minority groups’ means of influencing the political agenda of majority society. In this paper the latter part is dependent of an effective materialization or fulfilment of the former. This is to say that media institutions’ practices are substantially able to determine the level of influence given to the minority representatives on especially minority related issues. The paper examines this complex subject by answering the two following questions: 1) To what extent are immigrants and minority interest groups being quoted in the three leading Danish news papers on minority related issues? 2) How does the quotation statistics in terms of the immigrants’ degree of absence affect their possibilities of having a say with regard to issues that concern them as a social group?

We conclude that immigrant sources are quoted in only a fraction of our total empirical data basis despite the fact that our data consists only of news articles which can be considered being within the realm of immigrant issues. We conclude furthermore that this degree of representation poses as a serious barrier in minority groups’ abilities to affect or influence the shaping of the political agenda on immigrant matters.