The amount of hate speech directed at national minorities would be reduced by language hygiene used in the media and public discourse, say the experts at media analysis company “Mediaskopas,” who examined 850 media channels from the beginning of 2019 to the present. “In the media, especially in crime reports, emphasizing a nationality other than Lithuanian (although they are all citizens of Lithuania) reinforces a negative context and provides a pretext for hate to arise toward national minorities. Therefore, language hygiene is especially important in the public sphere: by abandoning the emphatic highlighting of nationality, hate speech toward national minorities will also decrease significantly,” says Aidas Petrošius, an expert at the media research company “Mediaskopas.”
