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Cases of discrimination in the media
Cases of discrimination
gathered by the FSG in 2014
Cases in the media
From 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2014 the FSG’s documentation centre registered 7 102 news items mentioning
Roma or the Roma community in general (local, regional and state media). Many of these stories were about events in
which Roma persons were involved and the texts often referred to their ethnicity or employed terms such as ‘clan’,
‘reyerta’ (brawl), ‘patriarch’, etc. As we will see in the cases registered, these references to Roma and the use of inap-
propriate terms do not contribute any useful information to the news item but do help to confirm stereotypes and
prejudices.
Internet and social networks are another source of negative comments and images concerning Roma. The online press
contains many anti-Roma hate messages by readers which should be regulated by those responsible for these media.
Twitter and Facebook are platforms where quite a bit of hate speech is published as well, something which the new
Criminal Code treats as a crime when it is an attack on the image and dignity of a person or community and when it
incites racial or ethnic hatred.
Part of the work of the FSG’s Equality and Anti-discrimination department is to denounce these cases of anti-Roma
hate speech and encourage media professionals to paint a more realistic picture of the diversity of the Roma commu-
nity and help prevent the spread of stereotypes.