The Department of Equal Opportunities in the Italian Prime Minister’s Office has pledged nearly €78,000 to programmes that include teaching journalists politically correct language on migration and LGBT issues.
Around 500 Italian journalists are likely to participate in the programmes which allegedly intend to educate journalists to avoid terms that may appear “offensive” and “divisive”.
According to a report from Italian newspaper Il Giornale, the money will be spent on several different projects, including two LGBT cultural events, one of which will examine “trans cinema” and “transsexualism in the process of migration”.
One programme will be run by the Carta di Roma association, which was established in 2011 “with the goal of implementing the Journalist’s Code of Conduct on immigration”, according to the group’s website.
The group states one of its main goals as a “collaboration between media operators, university institutes, civil society organisations and editors, with the goal of promoting respect and guarantee of the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, migrants or minorities in general”.
The programme, which will last until May of 2021, comes just two years after the Federazione Nazionale Stampa Italiana (FNSI), a trade union representing Italian journalists, demanded reporters stop using various terms when writing about migrants.
Such terms included “clandestine migrant” which, according to the FNSI, should be replaced with “irregular migrant” or writers should instead refer to migrants as being in the country “without regular permission”.
The association stated that the term “illegal migrant” was especially troublesome as it “contains a negative judgment a priori, suggests the idea that the migrant acts in the dark, secretly, as a criminal”.
In 2017, the European Union-funded project “Respect Words” released a guideline for journalists that called on writers not to mention ethnic backgrounds of migrant criminals and to work to counter what it labelled “hate propaganda”.