Medie- og nyhetsvaner blant fremmedkulturelle ungdommer

Norway is a country with a high amount of media and with a large number of news channels and sources available, all widely used by their citizens. There’s a broad range of research on the media habits concentrating on different aspects like age, residence, gender and education, but there’s been a lack of research concerning immigrants’ use of media, despite the fact that they consist of almost 10 % of the Norwegian population, a number only increasing. Assuming that they use media differently according to their cultural background, this master thesis treats the use of media and news among young immigrants with a distant cultural background compared to the ethnic Norwegians, focusing especially on TV, newspapers and Internet. The objective is to obtain information about what media they use, why and how much time they use on media and news in their daily life, and also find out what their media use means for them in aspect of their own identification process and whether it affects their view on Norwegian press. The approach to the problem is empirical, using both a survey and interviews to explore the media use among the chosen students age 17-19. The study, in general, shows that the multicultural students use more or less the same amount of time and have very similar media habits in respect to the choice of media compared with other Norwegian teenagers. They all use media mainly for entertainment, but also to get information and news, and for communication. However, when it comes to news, as a result of their multicultural background, they tend to use more time and more sources in search for information both on a national and global basis, specifically about their heritage country, compared to the Norwegians. They are generally interested in both global and national matters, and they use mainly TV and the Internet to obtain this information and fewer printed newspapers. On television they watch both Norwegian and foreign channels, often as a family gathering. Almost everybody has satellite-TV, and they are conscious about their choice of source. Meanwhile the Internet is more of a lonely activity and different net pages are used. They use this information to compare and dig for a better and more correct understanding on world matters, and cases are discussed among family and friends. When or if their heritage country gets into trouble or war, their media interest equally rises. This tendency is apparent despite their Norwegian-speaking ability or their grades at school. As individuals they all stand up as multicultural and being proud of it. Despite that most of them find the Norwegian press both fair and neutral, many emphasize the tendency of blaming immigrants openly in the news, especially in criminal matter