Members of the African community and other ethnic minorities should object when the media is racist in its coverage of their issues, a conference on the media and racism was told yesterday.
Mr Abel Ugba, of the Department of Sociology at Trinity College, said many newspapers, particularly tabloids, "wouldn't treat Irish or white people" the way they treated ethnic minorities in their news coverage because legal action would be taken against them.
"They do it to us because we seem helpless," he said. "We, as ethnic minorities, should move away from a position of helplessness to being active, to make some noise."
Ms Sue Caro, senior diversity manager with the BBC said, however, she would be concerned if the burden of addressing racism in the majority community media "was carried by the ethnic minorities".
"The use of images and language is very important but the racism issue is our problem. We have to own it," she said.
Mr Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations in Britain, said racism had been "popularised" by the British media.
Over the last 10 years, he said, "the asylum seeker \ entered the tabloid stage as a new stock character with a set role in the daily performance" in Britain. "The fact that the refugee will find it difficult to speak for herself, not least because of the fear that it will affect her asylum claim, means that she can become a screen onto which all manner of evils can be projected, without fear of contradiction."
Ms Nuala Haughey, social and racial affairs correspondent of The Irish Times, said the Irish law governing the media and asylum seekers - where written consent is required from the Department of Justice before an asylum applicant may be interviewed or photographed - was effectively a statutory means "of silencing that community".
Mr Thomas McCann of the Irish Traveller Movement, called for a formal mechanism for Traveller organisations to address the adverse way in which they are frequently represented by the media.
He was particularly critical of articles by Mr Kevin Myers in The Irish Times, saying: "I write diaries but I keep them private and I wish others would do the same thing."
Yesterday's conference was organised by Amnesty International.
