The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the fabulous Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam, whose focus is on the salience and contexts of racist language as it is reported in German news media. Such racist language is not limited to offensive terms only, but also includes terms that are related to racism through their meanings and origins, including slurs, metaphors, compound words, adjectives, and coded language.
News media (understood broadly here, thus also including alternative ‘news’ media) can reproduce, legitimise, or challenge such narratives; this depends on their political orientation and journalistic traditions. The key distinction here is between straightforward use of such language (which furthers racist meanings) and more complex negotiation of racist language, which describes and potentially challenges it (and connects to debates about political correctness).
How much does such language appear, then, and in what linguistic and thematic contexts, across various German news media outlets? The project gathered news media content between 2003 and 2022 from three legacy and three alternative right-wing news outlets based on a set of relevant search terms; it constructed a dictionary of relevant terms from a range of courses (manual coding, existing lists from civic organisations, and terms surfaced through surveys with relevant societal groups), explored the most frequently co-occurring terms and their trends over time, and engaged in topic modelling across the data.
Conventional media patterns are low and stable, but right-wing media contain many relevant terms (especially relating to migration and Islamophobia); right-wing media also target individuals more than groups. Such topics emerge over time especially in response to contextual developments, of course. Mainstream media engage more strongly in a negotiation of these terms, while right-wing media largely simply employ these terms without considering or challenging them.
