The amount of hate speech toward national minorities would be reduced by linguistic hygiene in the media and public discourse, say experts from the media analytics company “Mediaskopas,” which has analyzed 850 media channels from the beginning of 2019 to the present. “In the media, especially in crime reports, emphasizing a nationality other than Lithuanian (even though they are all citizens of Lithuania) strengthens the negative context and provides a pretext for hatred toward national minorities. Therefore, linguistic hygiene is especially important in the public sphere: if such marked emphasis on nationality is abandoned, hate speech toward national minorities will also clearly decrease,” says Aidas Petrošius, an expert at the media research company “Mediaskopas.”
