Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.05.2008, Qupperneq 6

Arash Mokhtari is a project leader for Quick
Response in Sweden, a journalistic watchdog
organisation that is focused on the portrayal of
immigrants in the Swedish Media. Mokhtari was
recently in Iceland where he addressed a confer-
ence for journalists about immigration issues in
the media. A Grapevine reporter sat down with
Mokhtari for a quick lecture on journalistic eti-
quette in a multinational society.
Let’s start with you telling me a little about
Quick Response, and how it came to be.
Quick Response is an organisation of journalists
that study how the media portrays immigrants
and the integration issues and xenophobia. We
are journalists who investigate other journalists
or journalism, so to speak. It came to be in 1997
during the European Year Against Racism. At the
time there were a lot of misconceptions in the
media regarding immigration, the numbers didn’t
add up, and there was a lot of things that people
thought were wrong. So we contacted many dif-
ferent organisations, and asked if there was an in-
terest in an organization like Quick Response that
could respond to the failures of the media when
they happen. We became a part of the Red Cross
Youth, and we were a part of that until 2007, when
we became a part of the Red Cross.
So you are a journalist, and studied journalism?
Yes, I am a journalist and I work as a project leader
for Quick Response. My co-worker does more edi-
torial work, and she is a journalist and an ethnolo-
gist. So we have different studies behind us. I also
studied film theory where I was researching how
men and women are portrayed in films, and then
how women exclusively are portrayed and the
power structure behind that. I was able to transfer
that experience into what I am doing now, with
immigration issues. There are certain norms, and
then there are people who don’t fit the norm.
How does it function? What is it that you ac-
tually do, are collecting data, or statistics or
writing articles?
What we essentially do is we follow the eight big-
gest newspapers in Sweden and we research how
immigration, integration and xenophobia are cov-
ered in those newspapers. We collect the news,
and we often have eight different types of stories
on the same event, depending on what paper is
writing about the event. Sometimes the papers
will write that the suspect was from Tunis, but the
same news story will be written in a totally differ-
ent way in another newspaper, it will perhaps fo-
cus more on the crime, rather than the suspect’s
ethnicity. We write articles on this subject for
our website, www.quickresponse.nu. When we
update our website, we send out a newsletter to
journalists, politicians and other stakeholders in
Sweden. We want journalists to use this as a tool
to improve their work. When we notice that the
same journalists or organisations are repeatedly
writing stories that focus on ethnicity or immigra-
tion, rather than the actual news, we will sit down
with the journalists to talk to them and ask why
they write the way they do, why it was important
for the story to include the ethnicity of the suspect
when the ethical guidelines for the Swedish Jour-
nalist Association explicitly state that you should
not include information on persons if they are not
relevant to the news story itself. We also visit the
newspapers and give lectures.
Is there a difference between different news-
papers? Or is there a difference between dif-
ferent types of newspapers? Is the evening
press worse than the morning press?
This is a question that we often get. But honestly,
we have not been able to detect a noticeable dif-
ference. We follow both morning papers and eve-
ning papers, and what we see is that sometimes
the morning papers are worse than the evening
papers and vice versa. You cannot make the dis-
tinction between the two types of newspapers.
What we see is that the difference is mostly be-
tween the different journalists. Even the public
service media, that is supposed to the best and
is run without any profit demands, they often
make mistakes as well. We use articles that we
think are interesting to discuss; we copy them and
distribute them when we give lectures. We show
examples of how the media can be used as a tool
to exclude certain groups of people, or include
certain groups of people. That is, the media plays
an important role in how successful integration is
in the society.
When I think about it, I would tend to fo-
cus more on the negative aspects, but what
are some of the positive examples that you
could mention?
What we have seen in the last ten years that is pos-
itive is that people with an immigrant background
are more visible now in the media in different
kinds of articles. It used to be that immigrants
were only visible in news stories about crimes or
discrimination or exotic cultures. But now you
will see that people with immigrant backgrounds
are interviewed about their opinions on popular
culture or the weather. They are included more to-
day as regular persons, rather than being different
from the norm. That is positive. That is normalisa-
tion. People are presented as normal people in a
way. I’ll show you an example. This is a clipping
from one of the Swedish daily newspapers. This
is a Muslim woman who has been stopped in the
street and asked what she is wearing. In Sweden
we have between 350 – 400.000 Muslims, and they
usually only make the news in relation to Islam
and war, or Islam and terrorism, but this is a very
simple way to.... I mean, this may not be very seri-
ous journalism, but it is a simple way to show that
you can talk to people of different backgrounds
about clothes and fashion, it doesn’t always have
to be about religion or war or terrorism. News re-
flect identification, who we identify with, and in
certain cases you can see that the person who
writes the article does not identify with the peo-
ple that are maybe not born in Sweden, or doesn’t
look like an ethnic Swede. These are the things
we discuss.
Quick Response was founded in 1998. Have
you seen a lot of change in these ten years?
We don’t really do any quantitative measures per
se, there are other researchers that do that. We
work more qualitative. Right now, the Swedish me-
dia is very consumed with the murder of a young
girl in Sweden. So we are looking at how they de-
scribe and cover the murder. Do they describe it
as having cultural motives, or do they describe it
as the act of a madman. We focus more on the
quality. But we also follow what other researchers
are doing, so if a researcher publishes something
that relates to what the media is doing well or do-
ing bad in this matter, then we interview them and
publish that on our website.
Does Quick Response suggest or formulate
ethical guidelines for newspapers or the me-
dia to follow?
No, we simply work within the ethical guidelines
of the Swedish Journalist Association, the same as
all journalists should follow. When we see other
journalists break these guidelines, we discuss with
them why they were broken. We do not enforce
any guidelines beyond that. I don’t think it would
work if we came up to journalists and told them
they were doing a bad job and shouldn’t be writ-
ing they way they are doing. We only try to make
sure they follow the ethical guidelines they have
agreed to themselves. According to the Swedish
ethical guidelines, a journalist should not mention
the origin or nationality of a person unless it has
a direct relevance for the news story. If you under-
stand the news story without knowing the nation-
ality of the person in question, then it should not
be mentioned. Obviously there is also the Swedish
law to consider as well. There is a law against hate
speech in Sweden. You are not allowed to write
‘kill all blacks’ in Sweden for example
So the majority of the work is discussing the
issues with journalists?
Yes, discussions and lectures for journalists.
So you could describe this a therapy
session almost?
Yes, almost. Consultation and Therapy.
By Sveinn Birkir Björnsson
The Media Watchdog
“What we essentially do is
we follow the eight biggest
newspapers in Sweden
and we research how im-
migration, integration and
xenophobia are covered in
those newspapers.”
As a project manager for Quick Response, Arash
Mokhtari conducts therapeutic sessions with jour-
nalists. Photo by GAS
06 | Reykjavík Grapevine | Issue 05 2008 | Interview