Both central and regional media exploit nationalist themes

The Moscow analytical center Sova jointly with the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights and the Moscow Helsinki Group monitored central and regional media to find out to what extent they used the "language of hostility". The monitoring was conducted in the Perm, Ryazan and Krasnodar regions, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg within the framework of the Counteraction to the Language of Hostility: Monitoring and Public Actions project, explained a representative of the Memorial Society's Perm branch. Its results have become known.

The authors of the research interpret the term "language of hostility" as discrimination expressions regarding racial, ethnic, and religious features of single individuals and their groups. The researches analyzed 30 newspapers, 5 of them being Perm ones.

They found out that almost all of the newspapers exploited nationalist themes. Though, most of the expressions can be ascribed to the "soft language of hostility". The leader is Moskovsky Komsomolets. Izvestiya takes the second place, and Komsomolskaya Pravda takes the third one. The most intolerant regional newspapers are Vechernyaya Ryazan, Kuban Segodnya, and Krasnodarsky Kuryer.

At the same time, three Perm newspapers - Mestnoye Vremya, Permskiye Novosti, and Zhizny-Perm - proved to be a pleasant exception for the authors of the project. The Caucasians, Jews, Americans, Chinese, Ukrainians, and even Russians are leaders as objects for the "language of hostility".