La alteridad cultural a través del prisma miope de la televisión

Resumen

Despite the growing multicultural nature of Spanish society, television offers very little information about the cultures of the immigrants and, when it does, links them with negative aspects that can lead rejection to the native population. This is demonstrated by a study on the image of people of foreign origin in this media, from which we have extracted some relevant results for this paper . The technique used was content analysis of a sample of the most watched programming, which included all television genres Our findings suggest that television rarely emphasizes the importance that immigrants retain their cultural expressions. The description of their current cultures and cultures of their countries of origin is almost nonexistent. This adjudges more importance to some of their personal traits and their job performance. This lack of disclosure about the cultural difference does not promote its titration by the local population, which could contribute to that acculturation becomes in a necessary condition to achieve integration into the host society. Additionally, when shown on television immigrants culturally distinct from the native population they are frequently linked to criminal activities, violations of the law and attitudes of dependency. Also it is they who have, as depicted in this media, an integration more difficult into society. This link between cultural difference and their worst integration could promote what some authors have classified as a new form of racism, which rather than argue the inferiority of other races to discriminate and segregate, uses the argument of the cultural incompatibility to the same purpose.