For the past year or so, I have been following the Finnish media quite closely. Since I’m not really a TV person, I’ve been reading various newspapers and listening to radio a lot. And I’ve learned a lot about the Finnish culture and society through these. For instance, one of the interesting things I have noticed is that Finnish media are extremely homogeneous and almost hermetically closed to everything and everyone that is different.

On one hand I’ve found all these newspapers and radio stations very informative as they cover a wide range of topics ranging from local to global. But on the other hand they also do what media can do best: ignore. There are topics and issues that are completely ignored. And what is ignored by the media is practically removed from the public debates. I’ve identified at least two such almost “forgotten” topics: minorities and immigrants.

In Finland six minorities are officially recognized: Samí, Romanies, Russians, Tatars, Swedish-speaking Finns and Jews. Even though they are not very populous Samí, Romanies and Russians are noticeable in everyday life (Samí in northern parts, Romanies, Russians and Swedish-speaking Finns in central and southern parts) and all visibly influence the majority culture and language. However, with the exception of the Swedish-speaking Finns, they are hardly ever mentioned in the media and when they are they are most often either perpetrators or victims of criminal activities. This is especially true for the Romanies.

Simiarly could be said for the immigrants. The picture of immigrant life was until very recently even more blurred. Until just a month or so ago there has been very little talk about immigrants even though they represent a substantial part of the population, especially in the southern parts of the country and Helsinki area. But there has been some noticeable positive progress.

Finnish commercial TV station MTV3 in November begun airing a TV series Mogadishu Avenue. Mogadishu Avenue peeps into immigrant life in Helsinki. The series takes place in Meri-Rastila, an area of Helsinki where every fifth resident has a foreign background.

Also in November national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat opened on their Web site a section devoted to immigrants. Even though there is not much to read there right now, I expect that they will be expanding this section in the following weeks and months. Then on November 30th Helsingin Sanomat organized event Uusia helsinkiläisiä – kaikki hyvin? (New helsinkians - everything alright?) where both immigrants and locals presented and discussed various issues they encounter in their everyday life. And the topic is quite hot right now. I don’t exactly know if this is so because the parliamentary elections are taking place in March 2007 and immigrants are definitely one of the top campaign topics for many parties. Or is it simply because just now the number of immigrants has reached a point when a public discussion had to be initiated.

Whatever the reason, I think this discussion has been awaited for a long time now. There are many obstacles immigrants need to cross in Finland. Following the topic in the papers, I got the feeling that all immigrants need to be better in every aspect to be equal to locals. And that applies to everything including the knowledge of the language. In a recent article editors from different media almost unanimously claimed that they would employ maybe second or only third generation immigrants, all blaming the difficult language for such delay. There must be something else at stake here, especially when the managing editor of Helsingin Sanomat Kimmo Pietinen states that “the influence [of immigrants] can only be positive. Anyway, buses wouldn’t move, offices wouldn’t be cleaned and maybe newspapers would be delivered.”

Mladen

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Culture, Finland, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.