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Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing Cultural Boundaries

January 2000

Publisher: Open University Press

Authors:

Simon Cottle

Cardiff University

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ETHNIC MINORITIES AND

THE MEDIA

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in CULTURAL and MEDIA STUDIES

Series editor: Stuart Allan

Published titles

News Culture

Stuart Allan

Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities

Chris Barker

Ethnic Minorities and the Media

Edited by Simon Cottle

Modernity and Postmodern Culture

Jim McGuigan

Sport, Culture and the Media

David Rowe

ISSUES

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OPEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Buckingham · Philadelphia

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND

THE MEDIA

Changing Cultural

Boundaries

EDITED BY

Simon Cottle

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Open University Press

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First Published 2000

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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 335 20270 5 (pbk) 0 335 20271 3 (hbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ethnic minorities and the media: changing cultural boundaries/edited by Simon

Cottle. p. cm. — (Issues in cultural and media studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-335-20270-5 (PB) — ISBN 0-335-20271-3 (HB)

1. Mass media and minorities. I. Cottle, Simon, 1956 – II. Series.

P94.5.M55 E867 2000

302.2308693–dc21 99-056966

Typeset by Type Study, Scarborough

Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Limited, Guildford and Kings Lynn

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS vii

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi

INTRODUCTION MEDIA RESEARCH AND ETHNIC MINORITIES: MAPPING THE FIELD 1

Simon Cottle

PART I CHANGING REPRESENTATIONS 31

NEW(S) RACISM: A DISCOURSE ANALYTICAL APPROACH 33

Teun A. van Dijk

WHITE WATCH 50

John Fiske

‘DREAMING OF A WHITE . . .’ 67

John Gabriel

PART II CHANGING CONTEXTS OF PRODUCTION 83

THE PARADOX OF AFRICAN AMERICAN JOURNALISTS 85

Clint C. Wilson II

CONTENTS

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A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: MAKING ETHNIC MINORITY TELEVISION 100

Simon Cottle

BLACK REPRESENTATION IN THE POST NETWORK, POST CIVIL RIGHTS WORLD OF 118

GLOBAL MEDIA

Herman Gray

PART III CHANGING CULTURES OF IDENTITY 131

IN WHOSE IMAGE? TV CRITICISM AND BLACK MINORITY VIEWERS 133

Karen Ross

ETHNICITY, NATIONAL CULTURE(S) AND THE INTERPRETATION OF TELEVISION 149

Ramaswami Harindranath

TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND DIASPORA COMMUNITIES 164

Marie Gillespie

MEDIA AND DIASPORIC CONSCIOUSNESS: AN EXPLORATION AMONG IRANIANS IN LONDON 179

Annabelle Sreberny

PART IV AFTERWORD: ON THE RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE 197

MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN MULTI-ETHNIC SOCIETIES 199

Charles Husband

DISCUSSION OF KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS 215

REFERENCES 221

INDEX 242

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

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Simon Cottle is Professor of Media Communication in the Sociology

Department at Bath Spa University College. His books include TV News,

Urban Conﬂict and the Inner City (Leicester University Press 1993) and

Television and Ethnic Minorities: Producers’ Perspectives(Avebury 1997);

he is co-author with Anders Hansen, Ralph Negrine and Chris Newbold of

Mass Communication Research Methods (Macmillan 1998).

John Fiske is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wiscon-

sin-Madison. He has written numerous books including Television Culture

(Routledge 1987), Power Plays, Power Works (Verso 1993) and Media Mat-

ters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics (University of Minnesota Press 1996).

John Gabriel is Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at London

Guildhall University. His books include Race, Culture, Markets (Routledge

1994) and Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media (Routledge 1998).

Marie Gillespie is Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University

of Wales, Swansea. She is author of Television, Ethnicity and Cultural

Change (Routledge 1995).

Herman Gray is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California,

Santa Cruz. His most recent book is Watching Race: Television and the

Struggle for ‘Blackness’ (University of Minnesota Press 1995) and he is cur-

rently working on a book about black cultural politics in the US.

Ramaswami Harindranath is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the Uni-

versity of the West of England, Bristol. He co-edited with R. Dickinson and

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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O. Linne Approaches to Audiences (Edward Arnold 1998) and he is cur-

rently working on a book about culture in a global perspective to be pub-

lished by Open University Press.

Charles Husband is Professor of Social Analysis and Director of the Ethni-

city and Social Policy Research Unit at the University of Bradford. He has

published widely in the ﬁeld of ethnicity, racism and the media and edited A

Richer Vision: The Development of Ethnic Minority Media in Western

Democracies (John Libbey 1994).

Karen Ross is Director, Centre for Communication Studies, Coventry School

of Art and Design, Coventry University. She has researched and published

widely on the broad subjects of ‘race’, disability and gender in mass media

and her books include Black and White Media: Black Images in Popular

Film and Television (Polity 1996).

Annabelle Sreberny is Professor at the Centre for Mass Communication

Research at the University of Leicester and was Director (1992–9). Her most

recent books include Women’s Communication and Politics (Hampton Press

1999) and Media in Global Context (Edward Arnold 1997); her current

research explores diasporic consciousness and gender dynamics in the global

context.

Teun A. van Dijk is Professor of Discourse Studies at the University of

Amsterdam. He has written books on text grammar, the psychology of text

processing, and news and racism including News as Discourse (Lawrence

Erlbaum 1988), Racism and the Press (Routledge 1991), Elite Discourse

and Racism (Sage 1993) and Ideology (Sage 1998).

Clint C. Wilson II is Professor of Journalism at Howard University in

Washington, DC. His most recent books are Race, Multiculturalism, and the

Media, written with Felix Gutierrez (Sage 1995) and A History of the Black

Press, completion of work by the late Armistead Pride (Howard University

Press 1997).

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

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Simon Cottle’s edited collection Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing

Cultural Boundaries constitutes an incisive intervention into a number of

controversial debates about media representations of ‘race’ and ethnicity in

societies such as those in Europe and North America. Each of the eleven con-

tributors engages with a key aspect of these debates from a new vantage

point, showing how the cultural boundaries of identity formation may be

discerned precisely as they are imposed, transformed and contested across

the mediasphere. As the editor makes apparent from the outset, the media

engender an array of crucial sites whereby the cultural dynamics of racial

and ethnic discrimination (frequently characterized as an ‘us’ versus ‘them’

opposition) are being actively invoked in hegemonic terms. At the same

time, however, he points out that these same spaces also can be used to

afﬁrm social and cultural diversity and, as such, help to create the conditions

for the articulation of resistance to these forms of discrimination. It is this

shared concern to examine afresh the ﬂuidly contingent forces of cultural

power being played out in media discourses, institutions and audiences

which lies at the heart of this timely and sophisticated collection.

The Issues in Cultural and Media Studies series aims to facilitate a diverse

range of critical investigations into pressing questions considered to be

central to current thinking and research. In light of the remarkable speed at

which the conceptual agendas of cultural and media studies are changing,

the authors are committed to contributing to what is an ongoing process of

re-evaluation and critique. Each of the books is intended to provide a lively,

innovative and comprehensive introduction to a speciﬁc topical issue from a

unique perspective. The reader is offered a thorough grounding in the most

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

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ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

salient debates indicative of the book’s subject, as well as important insights

into how new modes of enquiry may be established for future explorations.

Taken as a whole, then, the series is designed to cover the core components

of cultural and media studies courses in an imaginatively distinctive and

engaging manner.

Stuart Allan

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An edited volume necessarily incurs many debts of thanks, and this one is no

exception. I would like to thank Martin Barker, Charles Husband and Teun

van Dijk for offering their interest, support and kind words at the outset of

this project. I thank, too, all the authors in this volume for providing their

very different chapters. These collectively represent, I think, some of the very

best, critically engaged, scholarship in this most humanly pressing of ﬁelds.

My sincere thanks, then, to all contributors who produced their chapters on

– or even before – time, and I here publicly forgive the laggards among them

who, for reasons not always within their control, began to unhinge my

sanity along the way. Such is the lot of the editor!

Once again, I would also like to say a personal thank you to Professor J.D.

Halloran for all the support and encouragement that he has kindly offered

to me over recent years. His formative inﬂuence upon the ﬁeld of mass com-

munication research and research into issues of media and racism would

here be difﬁcult to overestimate. I would also like to thank all the producers

both past and present of Black Pyramid, an independent ﬁlm and video col-

lective based at St Pauls, Bristol, for agreeing to share with me their insights

into the problems of making minority television programmes while strug-

gling to make a difference. Thanks, then, to Lorna Henry, Ian Sergeant, Femi

Kolade, Shawn Sobers and Rob Mitchell.

This book, in no small measure, bears the imprint of the series editor,

Stuart Allan, whose editorial talents have effortlessly moved back and forth

between the minutiae of syntax to the book’s abstract conceptualization.

Stuart has also proved to be a dab hand at wielding an axe when necessary,

though mercifully his gentle swing and precision cuts have proved (relatively)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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pain free. I thank Stuart for helping to make this a better book than it might

otherwise have been, and for his consistent support, editorial acumen and

unfailing good humour – all essential qualities in the very best of editors.

Thanks too, to my colleagues at Bath Spa University College, particularly

Rob Mears for his gracious support across the years and Andy Brown for his

theoretical knowledge of all things ‘race’.

Finally, as always, heartfelt love to my family, Lucy, Ella, Theo and Sam,

and to my mother Rita Cottle, for putting up with the often dissociated pres-

ence in their midst.

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

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Mapping the ﬁeld

Today in countries such as those in Europe and North America, the relation-

ship between the media and ethnic minorities is typically characterized by

continuity, conﬂict and change. This book aims to explore the complexity of

this interaction by bringing together a range of the latest ﬁndings produced

by some of the leading international researchers in this ﬁeld – a ﬁeld, as we

shall hear, which is also essentially contested.

In academic discourse, as in wider society, contending deﬁnitions of ‘race’,

‘racism’ and ‘ethnicity’ – to name but a few of the key terms with which we

must grapple – currently struggle for theoretical and political recognition.

These terms and their corresponding theoretical frameworks, sometimes

called the problematics of ‘race’,1variously provide us with the means of

thinking about and/or thinking through some of the most fundamental

categories, distinctions and discriminatory processes that humanity has yet

produced for itself and within which, or in relation to which, many of us

conduct our lives and construct a sense of who we are, where we belong

and where we want to be. Speciﬁcally, three general ‘problematics’ currently

contend and debate the ﬁeld of ‘race’ and ethnicity in terms of ‘race rela-

tions’, ‘racism/racialization’ and, most recently, ‘new ethnicities’. We shall

encounter each in the discussion that follows. Approached through these

frameworks ideas of ‘race’ and ethnicity can be evaluated positively or nega-

tively, seen as imposed from outside or mobilized from within, and

accounted for with reference to deep-seated social inequalities or the pursuit

MEDIA RESEARCH AND ETHNIC

MINORITIES: MAPPING THE FIELD

Introduction

Simon Cottle

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of cultural differences. Fundamentally, though, questions of ‘ethnicity’ and

‘race’ are about the drawing and redrawing of boundaries.

Boundaries deﬁne the borders of nations and territories as well as the

imaginations of minds and communities. By deﬁnition, and often by design,

they serve to mark out the limits of a given ﬁeld, territory or social space.

Depending on where one is positioned or is able to stand – whether inside

or outside, at the centre or on the margins, or perhaps crossing and recross-

ing borders – they serve simultaneously to include some of us, exclude others

and to condition social relations and the formation of identities. Over time,

boundaries can become deeply embedded in the structures and institutions

of societies, in their practices and even in their ‘common sense’. Once insti-

tutionally sedimented and taken for granted, these boundaries all too often

harden into exclusionary barriers legitimized by cultural beliefs, ideologies

and representations. In such ways, the marginalized and the excluded can

become ontologically disenfranchised from humanity, misrecognized as

‘Other’, exploited and oppressed and, in extremis, vulnerable to systematic,

lethal violence.

The media occupy a key site and perform a crucial role in the public rep-

resentation of unequal social relations and the play of cultural power. It is in

and through representations, for example, that members of the media audi-

ence are variously invited to construct a sense of who ‘we’ are in relation to

who ‘we’ are not, whether as ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, ‘colon-

izer’ and ‘colonized’, ‘citizen’ and ‘foreigner’, ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, ‘friend’

and ‘foe’, ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’. By such means, the social interests mobil-

ized across society are marked out from each other, differentiated and often

rendered vulnerable to discrimination. At the same time, however, the media

can also serve to afﬁrm social and cultural diversity and, moreover, provide

crucial spaces in and through which imposed identities or the interests of

others can be resisted, challenged and changed. Today the media landscape

is fast changing.

Global and local developments in media markets, corporations and

technologies are transforming the media environment, leading to new

possibilities as well as to new forms of containment with respect to the

production, circulation and consumption of media representations of ethnic

minorities. Forces of political deregulation, global competition and the con-

vergence of (digitalized) technologies – principally telecommunications,

computers, broadcasting and satellite and cable delivery systems – have all

reconﬁgured the global operations, institutional structures and strategic

goals and market capabilities of major media players (Herman and Mc-

Chesney 1997; Mohammadi 1997; Thussu 1998). These same forces have

also contributed to the proliferation of media systems and output, growing

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

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audience fragmentation and the strategic importance of niche marketing

within and across the borders of nation-states – forces that look set to con-

tinue into the foreseeable future.

Set against this wider tide of strategic corporate change, however, are

the daily encounters and growing (tactical) uses made of new – and old –

interactive technologies of communication by ethnic minority groups

and diasporic communities. Today these communication technologies

include international telecommunications, audio and video cassettes,

mobile phones, mobile music systems, the Internet and email, digital

cameras, photocopiers and fax machines, camcorders, and home-based

computerized music recording and production systems. These time-space

collapsing technologies present new communication opportunities for

embattled and/or dispersed ethnic minorities, not least by helping to sus-

tain subcultures and networks and keeping alive memories and myths of

homelands as well as collective hopes for the future (Sreberny-Moham-

madi and Mohammadi 1994; Gillespie 1995). These technologies facili-

tate instantaneous flows of information and ideas as well as the ritual

exchange of symbols and images, thereby serving to construct and affirm

‘imagined’ – and now increasingly – ‘virtual’ communities.

Between the international media conglomerates and the daily mediated

communications of ethnic minorities, there stands an array of ‘intermediate’

minority media organizations – the minority press, local cable TV stations,

local radio, independent commercial television production companies, com-

munity-based ﬁlm collectives. These organizations steer a difﬁcult course

between universalist appeals, market imperatives and systems of patronage

on the one side, and particularistic aims, community based expectations and

felt obligations on the other. Taken together they contribute an important,

albeit under-researched, dimension to the communication environment of

ethnic minorities and their struggles for ‘authentic’ and/or pluralistic rep-

resentations (Cottle 1997; Dayan 1998; Browne 1999).

Integral to these struggles are demands that relate speciﬁcally to the cul-

tural-politics of representation based on calls for enhanced media access and

recognition, whether in mainstream and/or via minority media and outlets.

Here limited gains, as well as continuing constraints and setbacks, charac-

terize the contemporary ethnic minority media scene. The mainstream

media, though differentiated by medium, outlet, genre and subject interests,

all too often produce shocking examples of xenophobic reporting and racist

portrayal, while often publicly committing to the ideals and practices of an

inclusive multi-ethnic, multicultural society. Institutional inertia, as well as

countervailing tendencies, are at work in the operations and the output

of today’s mainstream media, as are ideas of multiculturalism and the

MEDIA RESEARCH AND ETHNIC MINORITIES: MAPPING THE FIELD 3

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representations of white backlash culture. Contradiction and complexity,

continuity and change characterize the media today.

Ethnic Minorities and the Media examines how representations of ‘race’

and minority ethnicity are reproduced, elaborated and challenged within

today’s media. Particular attention is devoted to the forces that currently

shape and constrain their inﬂection across the media sphere, and how ethnic

minorities themselves respond to, use and deploy media within their every-

day lives, cultures and identities. The subtitle of this book, Changing Cul-

tural Boundaries, deliberately seeks to draw attention to the ways in which

processes of change are currently impacting on the production and reception

of ethnic minority media representations, as well as the necessity for many

of the media’s representational practices to be challenged and changed. No

one can seriously deny the importance, not to say urgency, of this ﬁeld of

investigation. How could they given the enormity of the human conse-

quences – both historical and contemporary – that ideas of ‘race’ and eth-

nicity have played, and continue to play, in structures of domination and

inequality and in the political mobilization of cultural differences and iden-

tities.

Towards new departures

Historically, ideas of ‘race’ developed as a means to differentiate social

groups as biologically discrete subspecies marked out by physical or pheno-

typical appearance, innate intelligence and other ‘natural’ dispositions.

These ideas are generally traced back to the Enlightenment and scientiﬁc

attempts to measure, calibrate, typologize and rank people in a hierarchy of

superiority and inferiority. Within the context of western imperialism and

colonialism, such efforts served to naturalize, in the most literal sense of the

term, oppressive social relations. In so doing they sought to legitimize sys-

tems of power and domination – systems that also found expression in the

production and circulation of popular cultural imagery and artistic forms

(Said 1978; McLintock 1995; Pieterse 1995). Today, scholars debate ideas

about ‘race’ in relation to the historical encounters between different

peoples (Jahoda 1999); their ‘disciplinary’ force in legitimizing imperialism

and colonialism (Said 1978); their basis in the philosophical tenets and cul-

ture of Enlightenment thinking (Goldberg 1993); or how they arose through

the contradiction between Enlightenment ideas of equality and the inequal-

ities of capitalist modernity (Malik 1996a). In other words, ideas of ‘race’

are debated not in relation to the discredited reductionism of biology but in

relation to the changing social and discursive formations of history.

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

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When approached in this way – historically, socially, discursively – we ﬁnd

that ideas of ‘race’ in fact assume different forms and are intimately

entwined with systems of cultural representation – processes that continue

to this day. Following the Holocaust, the ultimate racist exclusion, the use

of explicit racist language and images within western multi-ethnic societies

is likely to confront public opprobrium. In such circumstances it is under-

standable that essentialist ideas of racial difference may now become re-

coded into more ‘acceptable’ ideas of primordial ethnicity or deep-seated

cultural differences. Here culture itself becomes largely naturalized as the

carrier of collective ancestry, traditions and group/national belonging and

destiny: ‘the concept of race arises through the naturalization of social

differences. Regarding cultural diversity in natural terms can only ensure

that culture acquires an immutable character, and hence becomes a homo-

logue for race’ (Malik 1996a: 150). The ‘new racism’ of public language and

discourse, for example, does precisely this when addressing potential immi-

grants, migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers (as well as ethnic

minorities ‘within’ the territorial conﬁnes of the nation) as cultural ‘out-

siders’ who do not belong to a traditional (mythical) ‘way of life’ (Barker

1981; Solomos 1986, 1989; Murray 1986; van Dijk 1991; Gilroy 1992).

Confronted by such racism(s) – those that dare not mention their name –

we need to deploy sensitive analytical tools if we are to recover exactly how

racialized and racist meanings are embedded within, and reproduced

through, the discourses, language, narratives and images of media repre-

sentations. We also need to recognize the historically variant forms that

racism(s) can assume, and how these are produced within and through

different state, institutional and everyday practices. And we must also seek

to understand how the ideas and practices of ‘race’ inform, and are informed

by, other forms of social exclusion and oppression – whether those of class,

gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, nation or state. ‘There is considerable his-

torical variation’, as Goldberg writes, ‘both in the conception of races and

in the kinds of social expression we characterise as racist’ (Goldberg 1990:

295). Essentialist ideas of (demonized) national character and (tribalized)

ethnic differences are often mobilized by state and media in times of war and

conﬂict, further illustrating how racist discourses are not necessarily con-

ﬁned to minorities or need necessarily depend on the physical markers of

skin colour (Allan 1999; Allen and Seaton 1999; Beattie et al. 1999b).

Racism, then, remains an imperializing and opportunistic discourse capable

of accommodating all. These issues are disturbing and should challenge us

all to take very seriously indeed the media’s representations of ‘race’ and

ethnic minorities. They do not exhaust, however, the complexities of the

interactions between ethnic minorities and the media.

MEDIA RESEARCH AND ETHNIC MINORITIES: MAPPING THE FIELD 5

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The contributors to this collection seek to engage, for the most part,

with the changing relationship and interactions between ethnic minorities

and the media in the United Kingdom and in the United States. This is

deliberate. As the opening statement to this introduction suggests, the

relationship between media and ethnic minorities is characterized by com-

plexity, and one way of opening this up to considered discussion is to focus

on particular contexts – especially when seeking to identify and theorize

new developments and how these depart from previously established

research findings. Both the UK and the US have established research tra-

ditions in media research, and both have generated considerable research

in the field of ethnic minorities and the media – which is not to suggest, of

course, that important work has not been produced elsewhere. Strong par-

allels (as well as differences) exist between these two countries with

respect to the multi-ethnic nature of their societies and in the encounters

of ethnic minorities with the media – reflecting histories of enforced and

voluntary minority settlement, systems and structures of inequality and

political struggles for change (Small 1994; Parekh 1997; Stone and Lasus

1998).

A detailed comparative study of the changing cultural politics of ethnic

minority media representation in both the UK and the US has yet to be

written. The research studies presented here demonstrate that strong par-

allels do indeed exist and that findings, theoretical discussion and

methodological frameworks generated in one national context often have

relevance in another, whether in respect to changing representations,

changing contexts of production, or changing cultures of identity, and

how each separately, and in combination, register and contribute to

changing cultural boundaries. Many of the chapter contributions also

have relevance of course for those studying the minority media fields in

other multi-ethnic, inegalitarian and increasingly media-dependent

societies. Whether focused on the globalizing practices of transnational

media corporations, diasporic and transnational communities and/or

fundamental questions of minority ethnic media access and representation

these concerns, by definition, transcend narrowly conceived national bor-

ders and may well ‘travel’ and speak to other minority experiences and

contexts. It is hoped that readers of this collection, wherever they are

based, will be stimulated to ponder, discuss and even better still to study

and research for themselves the extent to which the ideas and findings

advanced by the different authors on these pages in fact apply to their own

situations and changing cultural boundaries.

Each of the chapters that follow is written by a leading researcher in the

ﬁeld, draws upon their latest research and thinking, and can be read as a

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

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self-contained and authoritative statement demonstrating new research

departures. When read together, however, this collection also encourages

you to situate each of these insightful discussions in relation to each other,

in relation to the wider processes of change (and continuity), and also in

relation to past research frameworks and ﬁndings. To this end each of the

chapters that make up the rest of this book shall be introduced so as to

highlight their distinctive contribution to the wider research ﬁeld.

Changing representations

Today researchers make use of powerful theoretical frameworks and

sophisticated tools of analysis. Varieties of neo-Marxism, multiracial femin-

isms and post-colonial studies, for example, all currently inform and con-

tend with both established and emergent approaches to the study of the

media including political economy, sociology of organizations and profes-

sions, cultural studies, discourse analysis and new audience studies. The

theoretical encounters within and between these respective approaches often

produce lively, sometimes acrimonious, debates centring on fundamental

questions of knowledge, epistemology, methodology and the role of politics

in academic study. Like all ﬁelds of academic endeavour with direct political

relevance, such contestation is hardly surprising, nor should it necessarily be

lamented. The clash of frameworks and methodologies can prove useful in

staking out a ﬁeld of shared concern and can also help to push the bound-

aries into new and productive areas.

Frameworks and debates help guide the questions asked by researchers

and the approaches that they adopt, and they also help to ‘test out’ the

robustness of research procedures, the validity of research ﬁndings, and the

political relevance of the work undertaken. That said, when confronted by

the array of approaches currently debating the essentially contested ﬁeld of

‘race’ and ethnicity, it is perhaps all too easy to lose sight of the common

ground, as well as some of the more fundamental differences structuring

the debates and disagreements. Here we can refer once again to the wider

problematics of ‘race’ and how each has informed research agendas and

priorities and helped to conceptualize different objects of inquiry. Their

inﬂuence can be detected throughout much of the research ﬁeld now sub-

ject to review.

Over recent decades, a considerable body of research conducted in both

the UK and the US has examined the media’s representations of ethnic

minorities. The collective ﬁndings of this research effort generally make for

depressing reading. Under-representation and stereotypical characterization

MEDIA RESEARCH AND ETHNIC MINORITIES: MAPPING THE FIELD 7

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within entertainment genres and negative problem-oriented portrayal within

factuality and news forms, and a tendency to ignore structural inequalities

and lived racism experienced by ethnic minorities in both, are recurring

research ﬁndings.

In Britain in the late 1950s through to the 1970s, for example, studies

observed how immigrants were reported in relation to the so-called ‘race

riots’ of 1958 (Miles 1984), public health scares (Butterworth 1967), prob-

lems of ‘numbers’ and tensions of ‘race relations’ and how this effectively

concealed problems of British racism (Hartmann and Husband 1974; Hart-

mann et al. 1974; Critcher et al. 1977; Troyna 1981). In the 1970s and

across the 1980s, studies of news, and other factuality genres, identiﬁed the

ways in which a ‘moral panic’ orchestrated around ‘mugging’ (Hall et al.

1978), the portrayal of street violence (Holland 1981) and inner city dis-

orders served to criminalize Britain’s black population and ignored con-

tinuing social inequalities and growing anger at policing practices and

harassment (Sumner 1982; Tumber 1982; Joshua et al. 1983; Murdock

1984; Burgess 1985; Downing 1985; Hansen and Murdock 1985; Solomos

1986, 1989; Cottle 1993a). In the 1980s and 1990s, studies have charted

virulent press attacks on anti-racism campaigns, the viliﬁcation of black rep-

resentatives and the support given to statements of ‘new racism’ by promi-

nent politicians, as well as xenophobic reportage of refugees and migrants –

actively disparaging attempts to further multicultural and anti-racist agen-

das (Murray 1986; Gordon and Rosenberg 1989; van Dijk 1991; McLaugh-

lin 1999; Philo and Beattie 1999). Across the years, numerous studies have

also observed the media’s use of stock stereotypes of black people as

‘trouble-maker’, ‘entertainer’ and ‘dependant’ (Hartmann and Husband

1974; Barry 1988; Twitchin 1988; Hall 1990a).

In the US in 1968 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders

published its report into the causes of the major ‘disturbances’ that erupted

across many US cities (Kerner 1968). In an oft-repeated passage it stated:

The Commission’s major concern with the news media is not in riot

reporting as such, but in a failure to report adequately on race relations

and ghetto problems . . . In deﬁning, explaining and reporting this

broader, more complex and ultimately far more fundamental subject

the communication’s media, ironically, have failed to communicate.

(Kerner 1968: 382)

More recently, bell hooks maintains,

there has been little change in the area of representation. Opening a

magazine or book, turning on the television set, watching a ﬁlm, or

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looking at photographs in public spaces, we are most likely to see

images of black people that reinforce and reinscribe white supremacy.

(hooks 1992: 1; see also Martindale 1985; MacDonald 1992; Corea

1995; Ramaprasad 1996)

These and many other studies, then, provide us with evidence of the gen-

eral patterns, impoverished representations and sometimes starkly racist

portrayal found in both the UK and US mainstream media. As general ﬁnd-

ings, however, these may suggest a relatively static and uniform picture of

ideological or representational closure and, in consequence, cover over his-

torical processes of change. Studies are now beginning to recover, for exam-

ple, how the changing ideas and political agendas of ‘assimilation’,

‘multiculturalism’ and ‘anti-racism’ have informed the development of TV

representations across the years (Daniels and Gerson 1989; Pines 1992;

Daniels 1994; Ross 1996; Bourne 1998) as well as those of the press

(Wilson and Gutierrez 1995) and cinema (Shohat and Stam 1994). The

inﬂuence of ‘liberal’ TV producers (Seymour-Ure 1974; Braham 1982) as

well as ‘responsible’ newspaper journalists and newspapers (Paletz and

Dunn 1969) have also been observed to have contributed to, respectively,

the downplaying of white racist fears and the selective curbing of sensa-

tional press treatments of civil disorder. These studies point to further

representational complexities and differences in and across the media. And

we must also note the limited but real advances in ethnic minority media

presence in recent years, whether in respect of TV genres of light entertain-

ment, comedy and advertising in the UK (Givanni 1995; Hall 1995; Beat-

tie et al. 1999a), or successful ‘soaps’ based on black characters in the US

(Downing 1988; Jhally and Lewis 1992; Gray 1995), as well as in the com-

mercial crossover (and commodiﬁcation) of the ‘black culture industry’

more generally (Cashmore 1997). These, too, are important features of

ethnic minority representation.

Today, studies increasingly deploy an array of textual methods of analysis

when examining the myths, narratives, discourses and language embedded

within media representations of ‘race’. The work of Mercer (1994) and Hall

(1997), for example, demonstrates how recent images of black bodies often

deliberately ‘embody’ ambivalent meanings that play on ideas of cultural

difference, stereotypes and intertextuality prompting readings that go

‘against the grain’. Other studies also generally detect at least some discur-

sive contestation and/or challenge to dominant viewpoints across main-

stream genres and within minority media outlets whether, for example, in

‘raced’ representations of urban disorders in the US (Gooding-Williams

1993; Fiske 1994a, 1994b; Jacobs 1996; Hunt 1997) or the portrayal of

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inner city ‘riots’ in the UK (J. Lewis 1982; Burgess 1985; Hansen and Mur-

dock 1985; Cottle 1993a).

To be clear, none of the above suggests that dominant views of ‘race’ no

longer inform media representations or serve to ‘racialize’ media events –

they most certainly do – but rather that this outcome is precisely that, an

outcome which has to be secured and managed if deﬁnitions, interpretations

and prescriptions are to be effectively imposed on such ‘events’. In other

words, media representations of ‘race’ are a product of social and discursive

processes mediated through established cultural forms; they are not a fore-

gone conclusion and they most certainly are not beyond challenge or

change.

Sensitized to the textual forms and discursive nature of media represen-

tations, recent studies have tended to reﬂect the growing inﬂuence of cultural

studies and the wider linguistic (and cultural) turn in contemporary social

theory. Here empiricist ideas of representation and ‘ideology’ have become

increasingly challenged by approaches exploring the ways in which ‘reality’

is constituted (and/or known) within language, discourse and represen-

tations. Approached in such discursive terms, representations do not so

much ‘distort’ reality as productively provide the means by which ‘reality’ is

actively constructed and/or known (whether via ‘social realist’ or ‘social

constructionist’ epistemologies). While this culturalist turn has helped to

sensitize many to the discursive forms in which ‘reality’ is literally made to

mean or ‘signify’, a strict adherence to structuralist (and post-structuralist)

preoccupations with language, texts, signifying systems or ‘regimes of truth’

must always, according to its critics, collapse into forms of textual deter-

minism, cultural relativism and political idealism (Ferguson and Golding

1997). For these commentators, the culturalist analysis of ‘texts’ should be

integrated into a deeper appreciation of the ‘contexts’ of production and

reception and becomes fatally undermined if permanently severed from the

sociological (empirical) analysis of social relations, unequal life chances and

the wider play of power.

Drawing a theoretical line in the sand an inﬂuential variant of cultural

studies theorizes popular culture as the terrain on which, and through

which, hegemonic struggles for consent are ideologically conditioned and

discursively played out and thus seeks to keep both the interactions (and

‘articulations’) of the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’ in view (Hall 1980b, 1999).

British cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s through its reworking of

European structuralisms (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes) and variants of

Marxism (Voloshinov, Thompson, Williams, Gramsci, Althusser) has

proved to be extraordinarily inﬂuential (Hall 1980a, 1980b), and its ideas

have informed analyses of media representations of ‘race’ (Hall 1978; Hall

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et al. 1978; Gilroy 1987; Hall 1990a, 1992c). Policing the Crisis (Hall et al.

1978), for example, had sought to analyse how black youth had become

criminalized and symbolized as a new ‘folk devil’ by the media in the ‘mug-

ging’ scare of the early 1970s. This ‘moral panic’, it was argued, helped pave

the (ideological) way for a new form of state ‘authoritarian populism’ (neo-

conservative politics) that itself was a response to processes of national econ-

omic decline and growing political dissensus. This analysis relating

representations of ‘race’ to wider state interests and processes of ideological

reproduction has proved seminal though its explanation of the exact

mechanisms linking media institutions, professional practices and cultural

representations to political forces of change may now appear under- (or

over-) theorized and in need of empirical support.

Recent studies in the US (discussed further below) have made similar con-

nections between ‘media events’ and deep cultural anxieties around issues of

‘race’ (Fiske 1993, 1994a, 1994b; Reeves and Campbell 1994; Hunt 1997,

1999). These studies generally observe how ‘raced’ media events serve con-

servative political projects but may also sustain counter-hegemonic dis-

courses. Studies such as these, then, remind us how media representations

can both register and contribute to the shifting political-cultural climate of

‘race’ – a conﬂictual and contested terrain that by deﬁnition is constantly on

the move. Today this terrain increasingly accommodates ideas of ‘multi-

culturalism’. In my study of a UK regional television news programme, for

example, I observed how ethnic minorities are now often portrayed in delib-

erate ‘multiculturalist’ ways through a (superﬁcial) focus on cultural festi-

vals, individual success stories and the cultural exotica of ethnic minority

cultures (Cottle 1993a, 1993b, 1994). These representations are examined

with reference to the established conventions of this particular news genre

with its populist pursuit of positive stories and ‘celebratory’ features around

lifestyle and consumption, as well as a growing multicultural sensibility

inside the newsroom. Despite the best intentions of the producers, such

‘multiculturalist’ representations, I argued, may actually serve to reinforce

culturally sedimented views of ethnic minorities as ‘Other’ and simul-

taneously appear to give the lie to ideas of structural disadvantage and con-

tinuing inequality.

Interestingly, recent US studies have arrived at similar ﬁndings and dis-

cerned a new and subtle form of ‘modern racism’. This is interpreted as the

unintentional outcome of news producers who seek to move beyond ‘old

fashioned racism’ by portraying African Americans in more positive ways but

who thereby create an impression of black social advance and thus under-

mine black claims on white resources and sympathies (Entman 1990; Camp-

bell 1995; Lule 1997). Similar criticisms have also been levelled by Jhally and

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Lewis (1992) at the so-called ‘enlightened racism’ of successful ‘black’ TV

programmes such as The Cosby Show, ‘which tells us nothing about the

structures behind success or failure’ and ‘leaves white viewers to assume that

black people who do not measure up to their television counterparts have

only themselves to blame’ (Jhally and Lewis 1992: 138) (for an alternative

interpretation see Downing 1988). Herman Gray has also questioned the

‘advances’ represented by such portrayals, maintaining that: ‘In the world of

television, [America’s] open and multiracial society operates within a care-

fully deﬁned social, cultural and economic assumption that keeps alive the

assimilationist assumptions of racial interaction’ (Gray 1986: 232).

These and other studies, then, increasingly point to the dynamic nature

and subtleties of media discourse and representation, features that cannot

always be captured through simplistic and static applications of the con-

cept of ‘stereotype’ (Mercer 1988, 1989, 1994; Daniels 1990; Cottle

1992). Given the common-sense status of this concept in public and media

criticism, it is perhaps worth pointing out some of its limitations when

unthinkingly applied to media representations of ‘race’ and ethnicity.

Criticisms of the concept of ‘stereotype’ include, for example, its apparent

conflation of universal processes of cognition with those more socially

motivated or ideological processes of perception; its competing realist and

idealist political premises – should representations portray the ‘negative’

realities of ‘raced’ lives and thereby seemingly endorse wider cultural typ-

ifications or portray a more ‘positive’ imaginary but then be accused of

distorting reality?; its assumption that meanings are ‘contained’ within its

terms and are not dependent on (differentiated) audience interpretations;

its pulverization of textual complexity and meanings, the latter of which

are assumed to be confined to, embodied within, and ‘read off’, depicted

characters – though these in any case all too often are methodologically

‘flattened’ in quantitative counts of occupational roles; and its displace-

ment of how, for example, narrative, irony and audience expectations of

genre may all contribute to the communication of meaning. In more

practical terms, the concept of stereotype may also prove increasingly out

of step with the changing cultural politics of representation. Recent ideas

concerning new ethnicities and the cultural politics of difference, with

their fluid understanding of contested subject-positions (Hall 1988,

1992a, 1999; West 1993) prompt a more diversified stance towards the

politics of representation – one that increasingly questions essentialist

stereotypes whether ‘negative’ or ‘positive’.

A ritual view to representations of ‘race’ also promises to move beyond

the relatively static ideas of stereotypes (Carey 1989; Ettema 1990; Hunt

1999). ‘A ritual view of communication is not directed towards the

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extension of messages in space but the maintenance of society in time’, says

Carey, and it involves, ‘not the act of imparting information but the rep-

resentation of shared belief’ (Carey 1989: 43). Ettema (1990), in a study of

‘press rites and race relations’, develops this approach and demonstrates

how the mass media not only reinforce social consensus by routinely afﬁrm-

ing shared beliefs but also ‘mediate situations in which individuals or insti-

tutions actively engage each other – often to further their own ends – in a

stylized public event – a “public enactment”’ (Ettema 1990: 310). This

approach is important because, again, it reveals how some representational

opportunities or openings can sometimes be won within an unfolding narra-

tive enacted (and contested) through time. These openings, then, are not

entirely predetermined by the forms of news texts or contained by the stra-

tegic advantages of dominant social interests.

Hunt (1999) further illuminates the power of this ritual approach in his

detailed analysis of the ‘media event’ of the O.J. Simpson case. This study

observes how different political projects sought to mobilize their interests in

and through four principal narratives that surrounded the black celebrity’s

televised trial and his subsequent acquittal for the murder of his wife and her

friend. Narratives of the ‘Celebrity-Defendant’, ‘Black “Other” ’, ‘Domestic-

Violence’ and ‘Just-Us’ variously served, according to Hunt, as hegemonic

discourses in support of the status quo or as counter-hegemonic discourses

aimed at disrupting the status quo and its current treatment of women and

black Americans. The study thus ‘acknowledges the potent effect of integra-

tive, hegemonic forces like ritual without discounting the possible inﬁl-

tration of counter-hegemonic ideas’ (Hunt 1999: 46).

Fiske (1994a) has also deployed ideas of ‘media events’ to capture the

seemingly ‘hyperreal’ media exposure granted to major stories like the O.J.

Simpson case. This media event became such a phenomenon, according to

Fiske, because it served to express the deep conﬂictual cultural undercur-

rents of ‘race’ within American society as well as the increasingly ‘mediated’

nature of our ‘postmodern times’. Fiske attends to the succession of ‘media

events’ involving black men in recent years, for example, O.J. Simpson,

Rodney King, Clarence Thomas, Willie Horton, Mike Tyson and Marion

Barry, and argues:

These men do not ﬁgure as unique individuals, but only as the products

of the white imagination; they ﬁgure as embodiments of the white fasci-

nation with and terror of the Black male and his embodiment of a

racial-sexual threat to white law and order. (Fiske 1994a: xv)

These representations of ‘race’, then, serve to racialize, criminalize and

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sexualize black men and, by processes of symbolization, the wider black

community.

Notwithstanding the ‘postmodern’ nature of our societies these ﬁndings

in fact resonate with those from earlier times. A chilling example helps make

the case. In 1938 Ames reported on her study of (pre-modern) American

society in the 1930s and how, ‘Newspapers and Southern society accept

[racist] lynching as justiﬁable homicide in defence of society’, particularly

with respect to ‘the protection of white women’, and how ‘This attitude of

society in the south – this sympathetic understanding of a barbarous act

while regretting the fact – inﬂuences editorial opinion’ (Ames 1938; see also

Omi 1989). Notwithstanding the developments and complexities of media

representations it seems that signiﬁcant sections of today’s media continue

to reproduce racist myths and white fears.

In their different ways each of the three chapters that comprise Part I on

‘Changing representations’ interrogate the continuing inﬂuence of white

racism within today’s media. This is so, notwithstanding the development of

new technologies of communication, growing multicultural awareness

within sizeable sections of the media audience, and the increasingly

unacceptable public use of explicit racist language. Each chapter provides us

with new departures in the analysis of contemporary media representations

and together these alert us to the necessity of engaging with, and critically

challenging, the discursive and representational forms of contemporary

media racisms.

In Chapter 2, ‘New(s) racism: a discourse analytical approach’, Teun van

Dijk outlines his discourse analytical approach and the insights that this

delivers when applied to an example of ‘new(s) racism’. Van Dijk’s work has

been at the forefront of recent international developments in discourse

analysis as well as in the applied examination of communicated racism in

both text and talk (van Dijk 1987, 1988a, 1991). His discussion provides us

with invaluable tools for the analysis of mediated ‘new(s) racism’ often

embedded within the structures and presuppositions of language. The exam-

ple used in this chapter is a news report taken from the popular British news-

paper the Sun, a tabloid that has often been criticized for its racist portrayals

in the past. In the light of continuing press reporting of refugees, ‘economic

migrants’ and asylum seekers in Britain in xenophobic, ethnocentric and

racist terms, van Dijk’s approach is all too relevant to our times and will

hopefully equip others to examine, expose and challenge the subtleties of

new(s) racism wherever it is found.

Fiske, as we observed above, has recently interrogated some of the US’s

most spectacular, hyperreal ‘media events’ involving black Americans and

how these have served to visualize white fears and imagination in powered

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displays of cultural representation (Fiske 1993, 1994a, 1994b). In Chapter

3, ‘White watch’, John Fiske develops his earlier analyses with particular

reference to practices of racialized surveillance since, in his view, ‘the rela-

tions between the seer and the seen, between the knower and the known, are

ultimately ones of power’. Videotapes and televised pictures have featured

prominently in recent media events, whether the live televised broadcast of

O.J. Simpson ﬂeeing the attentions of the police and his subsequent court

trials, the videotape of Marion Barry, the former Black mayor of Washing-

ton, DC, allegedly accepting drugs from an ex-girlfriend, or the videotape

of the Los Angeles Police Department beating Rodney King that subse-

quently led to televised scenes of the Los Angeles ‘riots’ or (discursively con-

tested) ‘radical shopping’ (Fiske 1994a). Developing theoretical ideas from

Foucault, Fiske argues that the growth of contemporary forms of social sur-

veillance are involved in the construction of a ‘regime of truth’ which serves

to abnormalize and racialize black people and maintain the social order of

whiteness. Fiske’s chapter thus challenges us to rethink the apparent neu-

trality of technologies of surveillance and examine how these produce and

communicate racialized knowledge which differentially penetrate into white

and black lives.

In Chapter 4, ‘Dreaming of a white . . .’ John Gabriel also interrogates

ideas of ‘Whiteness’ and the roles played by both established and new

media in its construction and circulation. His discussion therefore develops

previous themes of the discursive complexity and articulation involved in

racialized representations, especially in relation to those of ethnicity, gender

and sexuality as well as the varying roles played by different forms of media

– cinema, television, radio, the press, the Internet, CD-ROMs – in afﬁrming

and popularizing forms of white consciousness and racist backlash culture.

Gabriel situates these developments in relation to the shifting politics of

‘race’, global processes of change and the intertwined histories of the US and

Britain. Whiteness should not be regarded as a monolithic discourse, he

maintains, nor are whites a homogeneous ethnic group; rather, whiteness is

a ‘pathological discourse which has been constructed to create the ﬁction of

a unitary and homogeneous culture and people’. Today many whites feel

anxious and under threat and this produces, according to Gabriel, a white

backlash culture expressed in and across today’s different media.

Changing contexts of production

In comparison to studies of media representations of ‘race’, racism and eth-

nicity, studies of media production in this context are relatively few and far

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between – a ﬁnding that reﬂects an imbalance in the wider ﬁeld of media

communication studies more generally, the practical difﬁculties of securing

research access to media production domains, and the inﬂuence of theoreti-

cal frameworks disposed to privilege the ‘moment’ of the text. Currently this

imbalance threatens to underestimate, and under-theorize, the important

forces that both condition and constrain, as well as facilitate and enable,

ethnic minority media involvement in the production of representations.

Studies of media representations often lack a theory of ‘mediation’ and, in

consequence, collapse the forces of production into culturally deﬁned

‘frameworks of knowledge’ that are thought to be at work in the production

(or, to borrow Stuart Hall’s terms, the ‘encoding’) of media output (Hall

1980c). As such, they tend to overlook Hall’s recognition of ‘the relations of

production’, the ‘technical infrastructure’ and the ‘institutional structures’

that also condition and shape the practices and output of media workers.

There is much more to ‘media production’, of course, than the professional

incorporation of surrounding cultural discourses. Neither can ‘production’

usefully be conﬁned, as theorized in structuralist accounts, to the ‘produc-

tion’ of meanings within ‘texts’ and systems of signiﬁcation, or processes of

identity formation ‘produced’ exclusively within/through contending narra-

tives and discourses. That said, ‘production’ is not hermetically sealed

behind institutional walls nor conﬁned to organizational decision making

and professional routines, and nor is it simply the (unmediated) expression

of market forces. ‘Production’ involves all of these forces in dynamic combi-

nation and much else besides.

Research into media production has particular relevance for our under-

standing and theorization of racialized and racist media representations as

well as for the under-representation of ethnic minorities as media pro-

fessionals and cultural producers. Miles (1989) has usefully differentiated

between the processes and mechanisms involved in the reproduction of social

exclusion, disadvantage and racist discrimination – processes that by deﬁ-

nition cannot all usefully be analysed and understood as ‘racism’. Historical

processes and structural factors can lead to exclusions and disadvantages that

are not, in consequence, consciously intended or ideologically premised on

racist ideas. When we consider the operations, institutions and practices of

the media we should therefore not be surprised to ﬁnd that a complex of fac-

tors and processes may also be at work here too, resulting in ethnic-minority

under-representation. Of course this is not to deny that racist thinking and

institutionalized racism may also be involved. But if we want to better under-

stand the forces that contribute to the under-representation of ethnic minori-

ties within the media workforce as well as their misrepresentation in terms of

media portrayal, we have to grapple with all the complexities at work.

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Viewed through a wide-angled lens, media production is shaped by pre-

vailing state policies and socio-political responses to ethnic minorities, as

comparative studies of different multicultural nations demonstrate. Political

ideas of assimilation, integration, pluralism, multiculturalism and/or anti-

racism can all variously inform the regulatory frameworks and cultural cli-

mates in which mainstream and minority production can either ﬂourish or

ﬂounder (Riggins 1992; Dowmunt 1993; Husband 1994a; Frachon and

Vargaftig 1995; Jakubowicz 1995). State regulatory frameworks and media

policies are themselves subject to international forces including, as men-

tioned above, globalizing market trends, increased commercialism and

technological developments, as well as other impinging geopolitical realities.

Media industries and organizations are competing in uncertain times and

volatile markets, and they strategically seek to position themselves in rela-

tion to regulatory authorities, competitors and consumers. Changing media

structures and processes therefore shape the production contexts and frame

the operations, budgets and strategic goals of media institutions, and these

are condensed within senior decision making and must be professionally

(pragmatically) negotiated by media professionals and producers in their

daily practices.

Only a few studies have empirically examined how these and other forces

impact on the production environment and producers of ethnic minority

representations (deﬁned here as ‘about’, ‘for’ or ‘produced by’). Such studies

include, for example, those of producers and the production of TV docu-

mentaries (Elliott 1972; Anwar and Shang 1982; Roscoe 1999); local radio

programmes (Husband and Chouhan 1985) and black liberation radio

(Fiske 1993: 227–33; Albert-Honore 1996); commercial TV magazine pro-

grammes and regional news (Cottle 1993a, 1993b); public service (BBC)

multicultural programming (Cottle 1997, 1998); independent commercial

and community-based TV and ﬁlm (Salam 1995; Cottle 1997); minority

cable TV (Tait and Barber 1996; Ismond 1997a, 1997b); the British Punjabi

press (Tatla and Singh 1989) and the Black minority press more generally

(Benjamin 1995); independent video and ﬁlm collectives in Britain (Pines

1988; Hussein 1994) and in Britain and the US compared (Snead 1994). Key

factors and constraints identifed at work here include, inter alia, limited

ﬁnances, resources and training opportunities, systems of patronage and

corporate gatekeepers, institutional conservatism and organizational hier-

archy, producers’ attitudes and cultural capital, source dependencies and

source inhibitions, professional norms of balance and objectivity, pro-

fessional status claims, cultural obligations and the ‘burden of represen-

tation’, audience expectations, temporal production cycles, and the

conventions and aesthetics of media forms. Some of these forces ‘at work’

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will be unpacked and discussed further below, as well as in some of the chap-

ters that follow.

Together, however, these studies suggest that both individualist and instru-

mental explanations of media production do not fully encapsulate the com-

plexities involved. There is more going on than simply the enactment of

individual ideas and preferred cultural outlooks, or the manipulation of the

media by senior corporate ﬁgures and/or surrounding political interests.

Indeed, early studies of ‘race’ and the media by James Halloran and others

had pointed to the complexities involved in explaining the media’s ‘failure

to communicate’ when indentifying the involvement of, inter alia, the ‘event

orientation’ of news, the operation of deep-seated news values (‘negativity’,

‘drama’, ‘conﬂict’, ‘personalization’, ‘violence’), the commercial logic of

the media industries, as well as the ‘inferential frameworks’ or cultural/

professional outlooks and expectations of the media workers concerned

(Halloran 1974, 1977; see also Kushnick 1970; Knopf 1973; Hartmann and

Husband 1974).

Accordingly, we must also attend to the various structures, contexts and

dynamics that inform and shape media representations – regulatory, insti-

tutional, commercial, organizational, technological, professional, and cul-

tural/ideological. To date, by far the most developed area of production

research concerns journalism and news organization and the levels of pro-

duction and professionalism. A brief review of some of these key ﬁndings

thus helps to illustrate some of the complexities ‘at work’, complexities that

are often missed and under-theorized in analyses of the cultural discourses

‘at play’ within media texts.

Journalist and proprietor prejudice

Anecdotal evidence provided by working journalists and observers suggests

that many journalists and news proprietors do indeed harbour racist views

and sentiments (Hollingsworth 1990: 132). Proprietorial involvement in set-

ting news policy, hiring and ﬁring senior editors, and even dictating head-

lines are also well documented (Pilger 1986, 1998). Much might seem to

depend, therefore, on the personal views of proprietors, senior editors and

ordinary journalists. However, on closer examination, research suggests that

other more inﬂuential structures and processes are at work.

Ethnic composition and journalist training

The ethnic composition of journalists, their recruitment, professional

training, on-the-job socialization, and problems of retention are clearly of

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relevance here. If journalists are found to come predominantly from white

middle-class homes, select educational institutions and/or share similar

middle-ground political values, undoubtedly this will inﬂuence the sensibil-

ities and knowledge base informing journalist output. Recent data and dis-

cussion of Britain’s ethnic minority journalists conﬁrm that a gross

imbalance between white and ethnic minority journalists continues to struc-

ture training and employment patterns and opportunities within the news

media industry (Ainley 1998). Of the estimated 4012 national newspaper

journalists only 20 (0.5 per cent) according to Ainley, are Black or Asian,

while a mere 15 (0.2 per cent) out of 8000 work for the provincial press. In

the broadcasting industry matters are slightly improved with an estimated

100 (2.7 per cent) Black or Asian editorial staff among 3700 – here, the

equal opportunities policies, ethnic minority monitoring and training

schemes of the BBC are thought to have helped, though Ainley (1998)

reminds us that half of all Black staff work on black-only radio and tele-

vision programmes. (For US data and discussion see Downing 1994; Wilson,

this volume.)

Such ﬁgures are an indictment of the news media and demand concerted

action to bring about real improvement. Ethnographic studies of news

organizations and professionalism nonetheless also indicate that processes

of journalist socialization (and retention) may be as important as journalist

recruitment. Colleague esteem, successful newsroom acceptance and pro-

motion and career moves depend upon conformity to a news policy and

news organization goals, not their disruption (Breed 1955; Mazingo 1988;

Cottle 1993a; Wilson, this volume). Researchers have also often commented

on the ostensible lack of conﬂict within newsrooms and the unspoken

acceptance of both shared news values and a widespread professional ideol-

ogy of ‘objectivity’ – an ideology that may well have the effect of distancing

ethnic minority journalists from acting as advocates for those minority

groups and interests they might otherwise seek to serve (Cottle 1998; Allan

1999).

Competition and marketplace pressures

News organizations, for the most part, are in business to make proﬁts and

all compete for readers and audiences. Political economy research raises a

third explanation based on the wider system of commercial constraints and

pressures bearing down on the ‘cultural industries’ and their news output

(Murdock 1982; Golding and Murdock 1996). Surviving in a competitive

marketplace means seeking the maximum audience/readers and the maxi-

mum receipts from advertisers. In this context, news is produced just like

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01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 19

any other commodity for the largest possible group of consumers. Within a

predominantly white society and culture, economic forces can centre

‘middle ground’ white opinion and interests since this is where the largest

market and proﬁts are found, and thereby marginalize minority interests,

voices and opinions. Also, high market entry costs and potentially smaller

audiences, and hence advertiser reluctance to pay for advertising in such out-

lets, all inhibit the successful formation and growth of minority ethnic news

media – though some have managed against the odds to secure a niche

market (Tatla and Singh 1989; Riggins 1992; Benjamin 1995). In the main-

stream, market pressures also contribute to press sensationalism, populist

forms and formats, and can lead to the orchestration of ‘race’ controversy

in pursuit of readers, ratings and revenue.

Bureaucratic organization and new technologies

Bureaucratic and organizational pressures within the newsroom, as well as

impersonal economic forces outside, are also at work. Confronted with the

daily pressures of news deadlines and the uncertainty of tomorrow’s news

events, news teams seek, as far as possible, to ‘tame the news environment’

and ‘routinize the unexpected’. One way of doing this is to rely on key insti-

tutional sources of news, such as the police or government sources, for

example, who serve as the nation’s primary deﬁners of reality (Hall et al.

1978). The result is that little energy or resources are devoted, as a matter of

routine, to the search for non-institutional voices and viewpoints. When

coupled with a professional journalistic claim to impartiality and objectivity

which, ironically, is achieved in practice via the accessing of authoritative

(that is, authority) voices, so the bureaucratic nature of news production is

geared to privilege the voices and viewpoints of (white) social power hold-

ers, and not those excluded from powerful institutions.

That said, recent sociological studies of news source interventions, as well

as ritual studies of news representation and production referenced earlier

(Hunt 1999), now suggest that questions of news access may not be so clear

cut and are contingent on the contestation of competing sources. The chang-

ing cultural-political ﬁeld of ‘race’ and the unfolding narratives of particu-

lar news stories can also contribute to a wider caste of news actors, voices

and viewpoints than may be anticipated, as certain stories break through

news thresholds and become mobilized by different political interests and

projects and stimulate ‘pack journalism’ (Cottle 2000a). In the context of

the UK, the unprecedented media exposure that has built across the years

following the racist murder of the young British student Stephen Lawrence

in 1993 is a case in point. Across the years 1993 to 1998 The Guardian

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 20

newspaper, for example, produced no fewer than 347 news reports on this

one murder and its aftermath. Generally media attention has focused on the

actions, pronouncements and failings of the police, the courts, a public

inquiry as well as senior government ministers suggesting that a powerful

combination of social and cultural forces are at work in the creation of this

high proﬁle ‘media event’ (Cottle 2000b).

Researchers also need to attend to new digital technologies of news pro-

duction and delivery which, in combination with increased commercial pres-

sures and political deregulation, have recently begun to reconﬁgure

newsrooms and journalist practices. Journalists are increasingly under pres-

sure to work ‘ﬂexibly’ as multi-skilled workers producing news for multi-

media news outlets. A recent study of just such a multimedia ‘news centre’

demonstrates how the introduction of new technologies and multi-skilled

practices have contributed in practice to undermining community source

involvement. This was so notwithstanding the possibilities of electronic

news production systems, the Internet, email, video telephones, video cam-

eras and so on to enhance search facilities, community access and widen

forms of minority ethnic news participation (Cottle 1999). Quite simply the

multi-skilled journalists fashioning news for TV, radio and on-line had nei-

ther the time nor the professional imagination to enhance ethnic minority

community involvement through the use of these new technologies.

Deep-seated news values

News values, ‘one of the most opaque structures of meaning in modern soci-

ety’ (Hall 1981: 234), have long been noted to help select, order and prior-

itize the production of news representations (Galtung and Ruge 1981). In

the context of ethnic minority reporting, then, it is perhaps unsurprising that

news often forefronts images of ethnic minorities in terms of conﬂict, drama,

controversy, violence and deviance (Halloran 1974, 1977; Hartmann and

Husband 1974; Troyna 1981; Cottle 1991). The question here, though, is

not whether these news values are exclusive to ethnic minority reporting

because clearly they inform other news stories as well, but rather to what

extent they ﬁgure in a disproportionate number of stories about ethnic

minorities framed in such ways. We should question to what extent ‘news

values’ can really be assumed to be universal given the professionally pro-

duced variations found in and across different news forms. The recent

development of, and controversy surrounding, the so-called ‘public journal-

ism’ in the US, for example, with its advocacy of democratic participation

helps to illustrate how ‘news values’ need not be seen as written in stone

(Glasser and Craft 1998).

MEDIA RESEARCH AND ETHNIC MINORITIES: MAPPING THE FIELD 21

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News forms and news genres

News organizations typically work to an identiﬁable editorial position and

in-house style. Journalists also reproduce these distinctive news forms

according to a number of genre and sub-genre conventions. These too exert

a shaping impact upon the selection and framing of news stories about

ethnic minorities, as the discussion of local news representations of ‘race’

above, has already suggested. We can also observe how processes of

‘tabloidization’ or, in more derogatory terms, ‘dumbing down’, led by com-

mercial imperatives and professional perceptions of their audience are today

changing television schedules, programme formats and newspaper appeals.

These processes indirectly and directly impact on subject selection and

silences within and across the news (and other forms of ‘factuality’ pro-

gramming) and often inform the sensationalist and/or superﬁcial spin that

accompanies their presentation – processes already documented to have

deleteriously inﬂuenced the TV representation of ethnic minorities and

issues (Cottle 1993a; Ross 1996).

The above has done no more than brieﬂy indicate some of the interrelated

structures and processes of news manufacture that condition and shape –

both directly and indirectly – the production of news representations of

ethnic minorities. Not everything, it seems, can necessarily be accounted for

with reference to the hegemonic play of cultural power and discursive con-

testation embodied within media representations – behind the scenes there

is often more going on than meets the eye. Today, as we have already heard,

the media landscape is fast changing and the three chapters that comprise

the second part, ‘Changing contexts of production’, examine this changing

scene in relation to the production of television programmes and press rep-

resentations of ethnic minorities. The three chapters address different levels

of interrelated change. These comprise the changing patterns of newsroom

recruitment of ethnic minority journalists and the impact of traditional pro-

cesses of journalist socialization; the informing context of commercial and

corporate change and the response of professional programme makers to

these new media constraints and pressures; and the changing global and

technological landscape of the media industry more widely and its impact on

the production and circulation of representations of ‘blackness’.

In Chapter 5, ‘The paradox of African American journalists’, Clint Wilson

addresses the contemporary position of African American journalists in US

newsrooms. The chapter ﬁrst historically contextualizes the current situ-

ation of African American journalists in relation to earlier calls for change,

and provides up to date data on the employment of black journalists and

editors in today’s newsrooms. Wilson argues that the situation, though

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01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 22

slightly improved in recent years, nonetheless remains woefully inadequate

and seeks to explain why it is that news representations continue to ignore

black perspectives, notwithstanding the employment of some black journal-

ists. Wilson focuses on how processes of institutional socialization and sanc-

tions within newsrooms continue to work against necessary change in news

media content. In effect, he argues, the pressures for change and the forces

of news media institutional socialization have created a paradox for black

journalists.

In Chapter 6, ‘A rock and a hard place: making ethnic minority tele-

vision’, Simon Cottle also attends to the production environment and pro-

fessional practices of ethnic minority media workers. Here, however, the

focus shifts to the production of ‘multicultural programmes’, that is, pro-

grammes produced by, for and about Britain’s ethnic minorities, by the

public service broadcaster the BBC, as well as by independent commercial

companies and community-based producers. Producers and the production

of multicultural television have often been overlooked in theoretical discus-

sions. Drawing on his recent empirical research, Cottle illuminates, with the

help of the producer’s accounts and experiences, how a number of commer-

cial, corporate and cultural constraints are pragmatically accommodated by

today’s producers. These constraints and accommodations are shown to

thwart programme intentions and cast doubt on corporate statements of

commitment towards multicultural programme production.

In Chapter 7, ‘Black representation in the post network, post civil rights

world of global media’, Herman Gray explores the structural transform-

ations in the global media industry and ponders what this means for black

television programming and black media representations. He raises ques-

tions about the ‘meanings of blackness’ when played in the distant reaches

of the vast corporate marketplace made possible by satellite, cable, the Inter-

net and other forms of global delivery, as well as the possibility that the per-

sistence of racialized programming patterns and viewing preference may

suggest the presence of a ‘post civil rights discourse’. Gray concludes, how-

ever, that though media representations do obviously signify at multiple

levels and in different times and places, they continue to bear the traces of

their conditions of production and the historicity of their time and place.

Changing cultures of identity

Studies of ethnic minority audiences, remarkably, remain a rarity. Given the

recent enthusiasm for ideas of ‘active’ audiences in recent media approaches

(Dickinson et al. 1998), this silence, with a few exceptions only, is perhaps

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all the more surprising. In another sense, however, it simply continues the

institutional logic and academic inertia which, until recently, has conspired

to ignore what ethnic minorities themselves might think, want, or say about

media representations, the media’s involvement within their everyday lives,

or their media hopes for the future. This situation is now under pressure to

change. In these ‘new (media) times’ of technological proliferation, acceler-

ating global reach, fragmenting markets and increased competition, minor-

ity audiences can become targeted as potentially lucrative markets and their

consumer tastes and media requirements may, in consequence, be deemed

worthy of market research. A growing ‘multiculturalist’ sensibility com-

bined with a corporate PR (public relations) culture has also, no doubt,

encouraged major media players to publicly commit themselves to multi-

cultural aims and occasionally sponsor research aimed at ﬁnding out what

they should already know – and many ethnic minorities, of course, have

always known.

More theoretically, academic interest in processes of audience reception

involving ‘interpretative communities’, ‘polysemic texts’, differentiated

‘decoding’, situated contexts of domestic appropriation, and media use

within local settings and cultural milieux, has also recently combined with

research interests previously signalled within the ‘new ethnicities’ problem-

atic. Together these conceptual approaches are now prompting new and sig-

niﬁcant work in this area (J. Lewis 1991; Jhally and Lewis 1992; Gillespie

1995; Barker 1997, 1998). Linking both these new approaches to audiences

and the new ethnicities problematic are shared concerns with cultural pro-

cesses of sense-making and how these inform the construction of identities

and communities – whether ‘interpretative’ and/or ‘imagined’. This cul-

turalist approach to audiences thus promises to deliver deep insights into

processes of communicated meaning and sense-making. As such it is a far

cry from earlier sociological attempts to map and record processes of media

communication and diffusion as in, for example, a study of the Detroit riot

of 1967 which involved interviews with 500 arrested ‘Negro’ men (Singer

1970), or the behaviourist simplicities that suggest a ‘causal’ media effect

prompting ‘copycat’ rioting (Scarman 1986: 173–5).

Market surveys, prompted by the commercial logics that underpin their

design, are generally poorly equipped to delve into the complexities of

minority and diasporic interpretative processes and/or situated media

appropriation and use. Recent academic surveys have revealed, however,

important patterns of majority and minority media use, programme prefer-

ences and attitudes towards majority and minority ethnic provision (Hallo-

ran et al. 1995; Mullan 1996). When aggregate results are followed up with

interviews, as in both of these studies, qualitative ﬁndings emerge that often

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01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 24

reveal collective minority dissatisfaction and frustration with the media’s

seeming inability to provide representations that portray their communities

and cultures, their difﬁculties and diversity, in ways that are thought to be

valid or fair – ﬁndings also exposed and discussed by Karen Ross (this

volume). Viewer response mail has also provided researchers with retro-

spective insights into how white and Black viewers have differentially

responded to and made sense of early ‘symptomatic’ TV texts, that is, pro-

grammes that register the racial tensions of their time (Bodroghkozy 1995).

Interviews with ethnic minority audiences of contemporary media ‘texts’

have also revealed differential readings (Bobo 1995).

These latter studies invariably move beyond a concern with differentiated

‘attitudes’ towards media output and pursue a deeper appreciation of inter-

pretative processes with the help of a model of audience ‘decoding’ (Hall

1980c). This model anticipates differential audience responses, given the

‘polysemous’ nature of media texts which are thought capable of sustaining

‘dominant-hegemonic’, ‘negotiated’ and ‘oppositional’ codes of audience

reading. This model informed David Morley’s early empirical study of audi-

ence responses to the UK television news programme Nationwide though,

revealingly, he noted how a group of black students ‘make hardly any con-

nection with the discourse of Nationwide. The concerns of Nationwide are

not the concerns of their world. They do not so much produce an opposi-

tional reading as refuse to read it at all’ (Morley 1980: 134).

In-depth qualitative studies of ‘raced’ responses to selected ‘media events’,

whether the Los Angeles ‘riots’ of 1992 or the trials of the black celebrity

O.J. Simpson, are also revealing. Hunt (1997) observes, for example, how

‘black-raced’ informants exhibited a consciousness qualitatively different

from that exhibited by ‘Latino-raced’ and ‘white-raced’ informants when

‘reading’ the same mainstream television news portrayal of the Los Angeles

‘riots’. According to Hunt, ‘They were generally hostile toward KTTV

assumptions that localized the signiﬁcance of the events, that blurred the

event’s connection to issues of systematic racial and economic injustice in the

US’ (Hunt 1997: 163). He concludes that ‘we are presented with a case

where textual interpellations and audience resistance are intimately con-

nected to raced ways of seeing’ (ibid; see also Fiske 1993, 1994a, 1994b;

Hunt 1999).

The complexities of audience reception and sense-making are not

exhausted, however, with reference to these ‘raced’ ways of seeing. The

interactions and various uses made of different media technologies and their

insertion into everyday cultural practices and cultural milieux involves more

than this – important though the structuring logics and outlooks of ‘raced’

media involvement undoubtedly are in shaping media responses and

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interpretations. Questions of identity and media interpretation are unlikely,

when viewed from the new ethnicities problematic, to simply render down

into what can often appear to be essentialized audience positions and pre-

dicted differences of ‘raced’ decoding. The complexities and contestation of

multiple ‘subject positions’ or ‘positionalities’ discursively mobilized within

and through ‘new ethnicities’, hybrid-cultures and contested cultural spaces

would rather suggest a more ﬂuid and complex set of cultural responses

within processes of media reception and identity formation (Barker 1997,

1998). Here concerns of mediated ‘race’ and racism appear to have become

decentred within emergent work conducted within the new ethnicities prob-

lematic. Current use of the terms ‘transcultural’, diaspora and diasporic con-

sciousness, terms increasingly substituted for those of ‘ethnic minority’ and

‘ethnic minority culture’, further signal this theoretical shift towards cultur-

ally ﬂuid, spatially transnational, and multi-layered discursive (and affec-

tive) ‘reading’ positions and how these are sustained within the cultural

boundaries of diasporic experience (Dayan 1998; Hall 1999).

The chapters in Part III, ‘Changing cultures of identity’, help to illustrate

the importance that is currently attached to this area of empirical research

and theorization and provides four very different discussions. In Chapter 8,

‘In whose image? TV criticism and Black minority viewers’, Karen Ross out-

lines and discusses ﬁndings from an innovative study of black audiences

commissioned by the BBC. The study involved 353 members of different

black minority communities and made use of different methods – focus

groups, interviews, viewing diaries, questionnaires. Ross considers the ways

in which black minority audiences interact with television images and

explores the perceptions which different black minorities hold towards tele-

visual output. Salient audience themes raised, and discussed, include audi-

ence ideas of ‘stereotyping’ and the marginality of black minority characters,

the dominance of ‘racism’ themes in programmes featuring black characters,

cross-cultural relationships, and the impact of negative images on both

white and black audiences. The chapter also explores some of the methodo-

logical concerns which arise when research with black minority communi-

ties is undertaken by white researchers and problematizes the notion that

only black researchers can do black research. Ross concludes that ‘What

black minority viewers want is not something huge and extravagant but

something small and relatively easy to provide: the opportunity to see them-

selves, in all their diversity, portrayed credibly on that most powerful of

media – television’.

In Chapter 9, ‘Ethnicity, national culture(s) and the interpretation of tele-

vision’, Ramaswami Harindranath calls into question the tendency within

recent audience reception studies to work with a static view of ethnicity and

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01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 26

a crude and reductionist understanding of cultural differences. Too often,

he contends, inﬂuential audience studies like Liebes and Katz’s The Export

of Meaning (1993) run the risk of reproducing racial stereotypes when

television’s interpretations are thought to be determined by the ethnic

community to which the respondent belongs. Drawing on his recent cross-

national research and deploying theoretical ideas drawn from H-G.

Gadamer, Harindranath acknowledges the centrality of the notion of collec-

tive identity in processes of audience interpretation but proposes a more

complex link between understanding and collectivity. His discussion identi-

ﬁes the presence of a ‘third’ culture, a hybrid between his two selected

national cultures. Not only is this pertinent to debates concerning ‘cultural

imperialism’, but also it suggests a vital avenue for audience research con-

cerned with cross-cultural consumption of mediated knowledge and the

complexities involved.

In Chapter 10, ‘Transnational communications and diaspora communi-

ties’, Marie Gillespie explores how transnational media play a role in sus-

taining South Asian diaspora formations and consciousness by focusing on

the everyday cultural and discursive practices among British Asian youth

living in Southall, London. Gillespie argues for the relevance of an

anthropological approach and illustrates her case with ﬁndings from a study

of the reception of two TV versions of the Mahabharata, a foundational text

of Indian society and culture, widely viewed in India and in the diaspora. She

shows how Hindu women in London and Delhi selectively appropriate and

contest key narratives for their own purposes, and in so doing subvert patri-

archal and nationalist discourses in the construction of their own world-

views and identities. The key ﬁnding reported here is that young British

Asians make shared use of transnational TV programmes and video ﬁlms

and that TV talk about them, far from being trivial and inconsequential,

constitutes an ‘embryonic public sphere’ involving forms of self-narration

and a forum in which different identities are experimented with and per-

formed.

In Chapter 11, ‘Media and diasporic consciousness: an exploration

among Iranians in London’, Annabelle Sreberny discusses ﬁndings from

recent research into one of Britain’s near-invisible Muslim and ‘unmarked’

ethnic communities. She reﬂects on the developing ideas and theorization of

‘diaspora’ and notes how work which focuses on racism, xenophobia and

the dynamics of exclusion in western societies often overlooks the import-

ance of cultural memories and attachments to other spaces and places that

ethnic communities often hold dear. Sreberny explores this dimension of

diasporic experience and consciousness, and examines how the contempor-

ary media forms of diasporic communities can ‘bind’ such transnational

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communities together and serve to maintain minority ethnic cultural identi-

ties, and cultural attachments. What we need, she argues, are empirically

grounded studies of how diaspora is experienced, lived in the everyday, and

what kind of roles different media play within the complex set of psycho-

logical, sociological and cultural locations that comprise diasporic realities.

On the right to communicate

The chapters in this book all contribute new departures in the media-ethnic

minority ﬁeld, and each presents new research ﬁndings with respect to

‘changing representations’, ‘changing contexts of production’ and ‘changing

cultures of identity’. Implicit to the structure of this book, as well as this

brief sketch of the research ﬁeld, is the argument that each of these areas of

research and theorization are indispensable for an understanding of the

interrelated complexities informing the interactions between media and

ethnic minorities and changing cultural boundaries. These different research

emphases and approaches are productive of different insights as well as

theoretical tensions – some of which have surfaced and remain unresolved

in this introductory ‘mapping’. Hopefully, however, the different levels of

analysis and insights produced by each can be acknowledged as necessary

for improved understanding. Political economy remains an indispensable

tool in the analysis of the changing conﬁguration of media industries and

new production technologies. Cultural studies and forms of discourse analy-

sis are no less necessary in the interrogation of media texts, representations

and meanings. Sociological approaches to media organizations and pro-

fessional practices, for their part, continue to produce improved under-

standing of the processes and practices by which media workers routinely

grapple with institutional constraints and cultural obligations. And ethno-

graphic and other qualitative approaches to the studies of audiences are now

producing real advances in our appreciation of audience media involvement

in processes of identity formation and identity maintenance.

Implicit to all the chapters that follow, despite their inevitable differ-

ences, is a shared concern with how the media currently represent, respond

to, and perform in relation to ethnic minorities living with multi-ethnic,

multicultural societies. Often informing these critical discussions, then, is a

normative evaluation of how the media ought to represent, respond or per-

form in relation to ethnic minorities, and it is this commitment which often

animates detailed research and provides the critical cutting-edge of engaged

scholarship. The term ‘multicultural’ is perhaps pivotal here and contains

within it fundamental questions (and immanent disputes) about the

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 28

relationship between cultural identity and diversity, citizenship rights and

responsibilities, and the exercise and organization of state power and civil

society. It also begs questions about the normative role of the media in rela-

tion to all of these issues. When ‘multicultural’ is converted into an ‘ism’ –

‘multiculturalism’ – as it so often is today, this tends to ﬂatten thinking

about cultural heterogeneity and glosses over the differentials of power and

historical privilege embedded in the institutions, practices and thinking of

‘multicultural’ societies. In other words, ‘multiculturalism’ often presents

as a ‘pat and pedestrian doctrine’ and parades as ‘the dogma of presump-

tive correctness’ (Goldberg 1994: 1; see also Shohat and Stam 1994; Hall

1999). Difﬁcult issues that go to the political heart of what it means to live

in a ‘multicultural’ society are thereby side-stepped.

In a ﬁnal afterword chapter, ‘Media and the public sphere in multi-ethnic

societies’, Charles Husband thinks through and renders explicit his norma-

tive ideas about the role of the media in multicultural societies and how the

media should help to construct a multi-ethnic ‘public sphere’. Rooted in

ideas of contemporary political philosophy, Husband challenges the inade-

quacies of much multicultural policy and Eurocentric human rights dis-

course. He argues for a policy of differentiated citizenship rights that

acknowledges the distinctive histories and current experiences of differing

ethnic groups and proceeds to develop a case for a further human right, a

communication right – ‘the right to be understood’. This right, he contends,

must be enacted in and through a multi-ethnic media public sphere. Hus-

band’s chapter is perhaps a little more demanding than the other chapters in

this volume; it challenges us all to think through exactly what we should

expect, and demand, of the media in multi-ethnic societies and why. It pro-

vides a ﬁtting conclusion to this collection.

Note

1 Ideas of ‘race’, racism and ethnicity have been, and continue to be, subject to

heated debate and this informs the politics of language choice and use. This book

is no exception. Thus, each of the contributors to this volume use and often deﬁne

their preferred terms in the context of their own chapter discussions and these

follow their informing political viewpoints. Some, for example, seek to signal the

positive meanings of ‘Black’ and/or its political mobilization through capitaliza-

tion, while others use lower case ‘black’ to describe enduring conditions of dis-

advantage, discrimination and racism experienced by different minority groups

and people of colour. Others prefer to refer to speciﬁc minority groups such as

‘African-Americans’ in the US or ‘African-Caribbeans’ in the UK and acknow-

ledge the important experiential and other bases of difference both within and

MEDIA RESEARCH AND ETHNIC MINORITIES: MAPPING THE FIELD 29

01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 29

between minority ethnic groups. These and other language choices, then, signal

the politics of difference and often give expression to three underlying problemat-

ics of ‘race’, racism and ethnicity. Terms set in bold throughout the remainder of

this book refer the reader to the discussion of key terms and concepts (see pages

215–20).

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE MEDIA

01intro (ds) 3/5/00 1:04 pm Page 30

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Apr 2022

ringers” the (Southernmost of Thailand’s) media in the peace process: Reducing bias and hatred towards areas and people in the Southernmost of Thailand aims to understand the negotiating between the ideology of “Stringers” the (Southernmost of Thailand’s) media in the peace process and the roles and responsibilities in reducing bias and hatred towards areas and people in the the Southernmost of Thailand by using in-depth interviews and dialogue processes, as well as participant observations, data collection will lead to analysis and writing of qualitative research descriptions. The results showed that 1) “Media” in the southern border provinces can be grouped into 5 groups, 1. Central media representatives 2. Stringers or journalists in the Southernmost of Thailand 3. Independent media who do not belong to any news agency 4. Citizen media and 5. Interpreter and coordinator media foreign journalist. Some media have overlapping status in many groups, but the dominant group is the “stringers”, mostly local residents, have the opportunity and advantage in terms of sensitivity to news sources but do not have the power to decide on issues or publish them. 2) The Role of “Stringers” the (Southernmost of Thailand’s) media in the peace process found that most of them did not reach the ideology of being a peace jounalism to support the peace process because of 3 main factors: First, dilemma, as if "between the buffalo horns" because of danger on both sides, both as a local people and as a local journalist, who have to negotiate with media ideology and one's own survival in a life-threatening environment, besides the stringers also lacked knowledge and understanding of peace processes and peace journalism. Second, the structure and policies of the media organization are determined by a centralized, relatively decisive power to decide issues and choose to deliver news sent by media from the southern border, reinforcing the horrors, create bias and cause hatred “otherness” in the imaginary geography of outsiders. The third, challenges in journalism include budgets, news sources, multiple sets of facts, and death. Keywords:Audio description production, Documentary program, Name superimposition“S

Ethnische Minderheiten in der Medienproduktion

Chapter

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Dec 2005

Daniel Müller

Media, racial bias and discrimination: critical aspects and positive actions

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May 2021

Sara Rebecca Spagnolo

This short paper analyses the critical aspects of the representation of certain ethnic groups by the media. The underlying assumption is that mass media have a central role in shaping our understandings and opinions about other people. When news media and broadcasts are racially biased, stereotypes are formed and consolidated in the public imaginary. This mechanism triggered by the media often results in discriminatory practices and sometimes even violence against particular individuals. Hence, this paper also intends to propose positive actions that can be taken to ensure a more fair representation of diversity and fight racial bias within the media while promoting multiculturality. «The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses».-Malcolm X 1. Introduction.

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