Media Flows, Ethnicity, Racism and Xenophobia
***** DOWNING ********** EJC/REC Vol. 5, No. 2&3, 1995 *****
MEDIA FLOWS, ETHNICITY, RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA
John D.H. Downing
University of Texas, Austin
Charles Husband
University of Bradford
Abstract: A commentary on the main
achievements to date in the research analysis of
the media and racism. The importance of media
definitions of ethnic majorities is stated first,
followed by discussion of media discourses
concerning settled ethnic minorities, race
relations and the news, ethnic minority media,
contract labor, migrants and refugees, indigenous
land-based groups, and, finally, ethnic minority
presence in mainstream media. Examples are drawn
from the USA, Eastern and Western Europe,
Australia, and South America.
This article is not intended as a literature review,
which would be a much more exhaustive exercise that would be
obliged to evaluate the worst as well as the best academic
offerings in this area. Instead, this article seeks to
comment upon the main achievements to date in the research
analysis of media and racism. Inevitably, however, it will
point up major gaps in existing research. The article will
address the following issues in the relevant literature:
discourses and representations concerning (1) ethnic
majorities, (2) settled ethnic minorities, (3) indigenous
groups, and (4) migrant workers and refugees. The analysis
will discuss news and entertainment media and will also
address the presence of ethnic minority group individuals
within mainstream media and their involvement in ethnic
minority media.
It will, moreover, endeavour to be as multi-national as
possible in its scope. This, it seems to us, is central,
for two reasons. The first is methodological, derived from
the importance of comparison, contrast and control
situations. The second is analytical. For while the racist
ideologies and practices of White Europeans and Americans
have held a peculiarly powerful and pre-eminent position
over the past five centuries across the planet, they are
regrettably not isolated in their impact, but rather take
the lead in a whole panoply of destructive social forces
that block the opportunities of subordinated ethnic groups
for peace and economic well-being.
Ethnic Majorities
A great deal of the literature on the representation of
ethnicity focuses one-sidedly on the representation of
ethnic minorities. This is not only absurd, but in a sense
almost runs the risk of helping to reproduce the problem.
It is absurd because it implies that the ethnic minority
group in question is somehow defined in a social vacuum,
rather than in relation to another dominant term in the
social equation -- or even terms, because often there is
more than one ethnic minority significantly placed in the
social structure. And implicitly, such an approach may
suggest that the 'minority' in question is indeed somehow a
lesser moon circling the central, 'normal' planet of the
nation in question, rather than an integral if not
integrated force within that nation. As Dyer has put it,
Looking, with such passion and single-
mindedness, at non-dominant groups has had the
effect of reproducing the oddness, differentness,
exceptionality of these groups, the feeling that
they are departures from the norm. Meanwhile the
norm has carried on as if it is the natural,
inevitable, ordinary way of being human (1988, p.
45).
Having said that, studies of media definitions and
discourses of whiteness are really rather few and far
between. Husband's Open University course book _Race,
Identity and British Society_ (1982) addressed this issue
for Britain, especially on pages 42-45:
Being British ... involved not only sustaining
one's self-image by flattering comparison with
'foreigners' but equally an immense sense of
continuity through a mythologised past ... it is
rooted in a common, if not identical,
Christianity; in a shared history of foreign
relations for centuries rather than decades; in a
working class conscious of the same imperial past,
from the tales of their friends and relations who
fought in wars; and in a middle class who,
regardless of regional origin, were the civil
servants, educators and engineers of the Empire
(pp. 42-43).
This formulation, although specifically concerned with
Britain, is an important pointer to a more general reality.
Russian self-understanding, for example, whether in the
classical form of Great Russian chauvinism, or in the more
muted 'elder-brother-in-socialism' ideology of the Soviet
period, is directly related to negative Russian stereotypes
of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Georgians, and Central Asians.
We may compare Orfali's study of the self-understanding
of Front National members (1990, pp. 267-73), and Wodak and
Matouschek's discussion (1993) of 'victimisation of the
majority' discourse in contemporary Austrian neo-racism.
Indeed, the notion of victimisation of the majority was also
a powerful factor in the final breakdown of the Soviet
Union, inasmuch as the Soviet structures were thought by
Russian nationalists distinctly to favour the other
(unworthy) republics over the Russian republic (needless to
say, the other republics saw the matter differently).
Jakubowicz et al. (1994, Parts II-III) address the
question of racism, cultural pluralism, and national
identity in the Australian context, and the extent to which
the now long past 'White Australia' immigration policy still
has to have its demise matched in media representations of
who is really Australian and what it means to be an
Australian. Australia's re-negotiation of its geo-political
identity within the ASEAN states may be driven by economic
imperatives, but it clearly has social and cultural
correlates that are yet to be adequately reflected through
its mass media (Jayasuriya, 1988; Bell, 1992).
Van Dijk (1993, ch. 7; cf. Van Dijk, 1991, pp.
199-208), also using British examples, notes how certain
mass circulation newspapers defined those elements within
the ethnic majority who were concerned to promote racial
justice. They were effectively defined as overheated and
obsessed deviants, prone to create racial conflict where
none needed to exist, and forgetful of the 'racially
tolerant' culture of Britain that their actions risked
unsettling rather than promoting (cf. Hartmann & Husband,
1974, pp. 172-74; Murray & Searle, 1989). Van Dijk (1992)
has stressed the extent to which the denial of racism
functions as an important element, amplified by mass media,
in the public definition and self-definition of White
majorities in the Netherlands, Britain and France. Reeves
(1983) has described this as 'strategic de-racialization.'
Dyer, in his study already cited of cinematic images
and discourses concerning White people, has also proposed
that unlike people of colour they are typically
differentiated from each other, by class or ethnicity and
gender. One gets 'the sense that being white is coterminous
with the endless plenitude of human diversity' (1988, p. 47)
and furthermore that 'white women are constructed as the
apotheosis of desirability, all that a man could want' (p.
64).
Interestingly, Dyer also proposes that some films
implicitly challenge White self-importance and the common
cultural value in EuroAmerican culture placed on the
repression of self-expression and the celebration of social
orderliness. Dyer readily admits that his conclusions are
tentative, but they provide a very suggestive basis for
further work. Especially important, we would argue, is his
recognition that media flows are not necessarily
monothematic, and that there may be strands of meaning in
those flows which challenge or even threaten to displace
dominant ideologies (even before the question of audience
reception is taken into account).
There are of course many historical studies of imperial
self-definitions (Memmi, 1965, pp. 1-76; Jordan, 1968, ch.
XIII; Kiernan, 1969; Drinnon, 1980; Sale, 1990, chs. 2, 4,
9); some studies, albeit contested, of slave holder
self-understanding (Genovese, 1969); and studies of racial
hegemony and the ideology of racial exceptionalism in Latin
America (e.g. Hanchard, 1994a, ch. 3). These are important
for a study of media definitions and flows, as I shall argue
below, because even though they have little or no direct
media or contemporary significance, they analyse the
wellsprings upon which current discourse largely draws.
Let us conclude this section by a further note on the
post-soviet and Eastern European situation. The public
definition of the ethnic majority in that region is quite
often based upon the notion of nationality rather than
ethnic group, though not universally or strictly so in
relation to all ethnic groups. Indeed, to some significant
extent perhaps even the persistence of sectarian
identifications represents a religious flask with
nationalist content.
In turn, national self-identification implies the right
to an autonomous state structure, something claimed in
Western Europe -- Basques, Scots -- only rather
half-heartedly by Eastern European and CIS standards. This
national self-identification also often involves a claim to
traditional territory, the Potato Principle as Gellner
(1992, p. 251) has rather acerbically put it: 'allocation
of a given territory should be determined by where a
population lived in the agrarian era.' The Serbian claim to
Kosovo, the Armenian claim to Nagorno-Karabakh, are cases in
point.
These are claims based on a self-understanding
different in kind to those of the ethnic majorities of
former imperial powers -- or are they? Is there any overlap
in the notion and discourses of victimisation? It is a
point worth exploring.
Settled Ethnic Minorities
This term is used here to differentiate for the
purposes of discussion, so far as it is valid to do so in a
given instance, an ethnic minority group whose members are
settled elements in the society rather than (a) recent
migrant workers or refugees or (b) members of a marginalised
indigenous group. For this analysis we are keeping the
three defined categories distinct, even though in some
instances there is, inevitably, overlap -- for example in
the persistence of the term 'immigrant' in British (Hartmann
& Husband, 1974; Downing, 1980, ch. 4) and French (Taguieff,
1991, vol. 1, pp. 127- 88) discourse to signify a person of
colour. Classic examples of a settled ethnic minority group
would be African Americans and Afro-Brazilians, whose
presence in the Americas long predates the Asian, and
Eastern and Southern European migrations to the USA and
Brazil of the latter 19th century.
This area is the one where the most research has been
done, and thus it is the hardest to summarise without diving
into a morass of detail. Let us begin by listing the
typical themes that have emerged from these studies, often
organised along rather diverse conceptual axes. Amongst
those which we will address below are:
1. The historical/colonial cultural legacy: and
its role in shaping territorial boundaries and
contemporary identities.
2. The social class dimension: and its
significance in relation to the exercise of
power within the state and globally; and its
fracturing of ethnic and gender identities.
3. The overlap between racial, sectarian, and
linguistic factors and stereotypes: there is a
need for analytic clarity in refusing to reduce
all discriminatory processes to racism.
4. The question of invisibility and voicelessness:
the denial of an autonomous capacity to speak
for oneself is a recurrent experience of ethnic
minority communities.
5. The simplification and homogenisation processes
involved in media stereotyping: media
producers and their audience routinely operate
with a partisan acceptance of stereotypes which
legitimate the status quo.
6. Problems of partial, intermediate, and
inflected recognition in media output: the
development of 'multicultural' policies in
modern states often generates new and subtle
stereotypes which sustain the existing
inequalities.
7. The interrelation between discourse and
representation concerning foreign nations or
even continents, and concerning 'fragments' of
those entities settled inside the nation in
question, require a continuous awareness of the
interplay of the processes of construction of
the alien 'other' located beyond the territory
of the state, and the related processes of
defining the majority dominant identity within
the state. In this process the ethnic minority
is typically constructed as the ambiguous
stranger within 'our' midst.
1. The historical/colonial cultural legacy has already
been addressed in relation to the representation of ethnic
majorities. It is a topic most closely analysed in the
British literature, for no doubt obvious reasons, but there
are other studies such as the analysis of Black images in
French advertising by Bachollet et al. (1992) that
underscore the importance of this legacy elsewhere. Pike
(1992), while not systematically addressing media discourse,
nonetheless provides a comprehensive delineation of the
cultural legacy of the United States' neo-colonial
relationship with Latin America, a factor of considerable
importance in the current public definition of 'Hispanic' in
the USA. Limon (Noriega, 1992, pp. 3-17) addresses these
topics in relation to films with Mexican or Mexican American
dimensions.
The area of particular relevance to this theme in the
Americas and Australia is, of course, the portrayal of
indigenous land-based peoples and nations ('First Nations'
in current Canadian parlance), which will be discussed
below.
Now, however, may be as appropriate a moment as any to
address two standard problems in academic analysis, so far
as we are concerned: (1) the issue of 'orientalism' and (2)
the discourse of 'The Other.'
Edward Said's contributions to the analysis of racist
and colonialist discourse have been masterful, and we are
not seeking to dispute them here. The problem is more in
the utilisation of his work, namely the subsumption of all
such discourse under the single heading of 'orientalism.'
The strength of Said's work lies precisely in its
specificity about the region in question, the ineptly-titled
'Middle' East. Colonialist images and discourse about South
or East Asia, about Africa or Latin America, sometimes may
resonate with their counterparts elsewhere, but need not do
so at all (cf. Kiernan, 1969).
The terminology of 'The Other' is also in our view
frequently problematic, though we would not go so far as to
term it fatally flawed. Its strength primarily resides in
its analysis of how social actors construct difference,
which has a bearing on a very wide range of social
interaction, not merely between different ethnic groups.
However, it is perhaps in its over-use that we see a major
difficulty: it implies that difference in and of itself
generates negative responses, which would seem very strange
to George Herbert Mead for example, for whom interaction
with the Other is how we first come to be socialised into
maturity. We would want to point to the necessity of fully
locating self and other in a historically developed social
and cultural context, and to retain a sense of the
complexity of 'the other.' Bauman (e.g. 1993) has done much
to develop a richer understanding of the psychological and
social ambiguity of 'otherness.' Furthermore, and in line
with the sub-topic of the colonial cultural legacy, the
point is precisely that the colonised are not alien, and are
thought, however misguidedly, to be very well known.
Perhaps particularly when settled in the midst of the
majority society as settled ethnic minorities they
constitute that awkward category of stranger, rather than
the more easily contained, and invented, category of alien.
They are known, but not of us, and may perhaps be able to
make legitimate demands that could be more easily denied the
alien. There is a whole stereotypical space in the culture
for them to fill, just as there is in European and American
cultures for Jews and Gypsies. Their personal physical
presence is not needed for the stereotype to continue, and
indeed is always a threat to the stereotype if normal social
ties are developed across ethnic barriers.
2. Social class, defined as a relational dynamic rather
than as a static descriptor, is also an important dimension
in media coverage, albeit rarely explicitly. Perhaps our
point can best be summarised initially by three remarks.
(a) Crime, violence and other problems of social
order are especially associated with media
representation of ethnic minority groups.
Whether in the study by Hall et al. (1978) of
'mugging' in Britain, or in Entman's (1990,
1992) analysis of racism and local television
crime news in Chicago, or in Van Dijk's (1991,
ch. 4) comparison of Dutch and British data
with a series of studies from other nations,
this seems fairly well established.
(b) Historically, whether in the USA, Britain or
other nations, certain types of legally
defined crime have been much more prevalent in
certain social classes than others. Street
robbery, hooliganism, public disturbance, and
similar types of offence have been common in
working class neighbourhoods, while
embezzlement, fraud and blackmail have been
the genteel and infinitely more lucrative
speciality of bourgeois classes.
Insofar as ethnic minority groups overlap with
the working class, and inasmuch as they tend
to be members of an extruded group within that
class, subjected to high rates of
discrimination, unemployment and low wages --
as, for example, the Irish in 19th century
Britain and the United States -- then there is
sociologically likely to be a greater
incidence of working class forms of
criminality among them.
This incidence, however, has repeatedly been
ascribed in public discourse to genetic and
more recently also to cultural factors
overwhelmingly associated with the given
ethnic minority group. Intermittent 'moral
panics' break out, sometimes perhaps
orchestrated or at least oiled, sometimes not,
concerning the threat to the social order
constituted by the group or groups in
question.[1]
(c) August Bebel once defined anti-Semitism as
'the socialism of the idiot,' meaning that a
primitive anger against exploitation targeted
a partially visible minority, Jews, rather
than socio- economic structures, as the cause
of injustice. Once again, we have an example
of a racist displacement of social class
processes. While direct anti-Semitism is
currently rare in the official media of
Western Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia,
it would be a mistake to assume no reversion
is possible.[2]
3. The question of linguistic and sectarian issues
overlapping with 'racial' issues in the media is also an
important one. The point is fairly obvious, but media and
other public discourse concerning the use of Spanish in the
United States, or concerning the role of Islam in Europe,
are both significant issues that touch simultaneously on
ethnic majority self-perceptions and on definitions of
ethnic minority groups.
4. Invisibility and voicelessness have repeatedly been
shown to be characteristics of media coverage -- or
non-coverage -- of subordinate ethnic group issues (e.g.
Downing, 1975, 1985; Winston, 1982; Jakubowicz et al., 1994,
ch. 20). Either the whole ethnic group is invisible, or it
is visible in certain highly specific manifestations
(problems, immigration), or it is spoken for and about by
non-members, or individuals or organisations are selected by
mainstream news professionals as regularly accredited
spokespeople for the group in question. In this manner,
communication media frustrate and defeat the possibility of
representative dialogue within the public sphere.
5. Ethnic stereotypes, like all social cognition,
simplify and homogenise complex realities. The problem with
them is not this in itself, but (a) the simplification is in
a negative cast, even when it may initially have the
semblance of being positive and (b) whereas in many areas
the dissection of complexity is also prized as a necessary
complement to simplification, in the arena of race relations
it is typically avoided as otiose. The precise stereotypes
vary with the particular ethnic minority group, be they
Mexican Americans or Algerians or Jews or Turks. This in
part supplies them with their tenacity, in that they appear
to have some genuine purchase upon very specific empirical
realities. Their essence is not thought possible for its
category members to escape, and exceptions are always taken
to prove the rule (Ramirez-Berg, 1990). Indeed a part of
the vitality of stereotypes in use is their capacity to
operate as fragmented images capable of assembly and
disassem bly into endless pragmatic conglomerates of meaning
(Essed, 1991; Wetherell & Potter, 1992).
6. One of the most important but difficult issues to
examine is what might be termed the second phase of ethnic
group representation in media coverage: the point at which
protests and critiques begin to lodge in media
organisations' planning, and the representations change from
the grossest deformations to more sophisticated ones. This
is a classic area of 'half-empty versus half-full' analyses
(cf Downing, 1988; Jhally & Lewis, 1992). Reference has
already been made in section 2 to the Jakubowicz et al
(1994) study of contemporary multiculturalism in Australian
media, but it is a topic sourly summarised in the title of
Leab's book on the representation of Black people in
Hollywood cinema up to the mid-1970s, namely _From Sambo To
Superspade_. In other words, one demeaning stereotype of
absurdity and powerlessness was replaced by another one of
seeming but totally fantasised power in the Shaft series of
Black super cop movies. The more recent splash of Black
teen hoodlum movies would underline the same point.
7. Lastly, on fragment cultures: images and discourses
of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the 'Middle' East
undoubtedly also have a major impact upon the public culture
in metropolitan countries given the tendency to essentialism
that is endemic in racist ideology.
News and Race Relations
Indeed, a key methodological issue for media flows
research is also precisely how best to handle the
inter-textual chorus -- what to do about cinema,
advertising, public relations, and entertainment media in
relation to the news categories that have tended to be the
predominant focus of such research. The image of the chorus
should not be overstretched, as a number of these thematic
and ideological interconnections are dissonant, not
functionally harmonious.
The study of television and terrorism by Schlesinger et
al. (1983), which examined the relations between
entertainment and news processing of the topic, is one
useful pointer to how this methodological issue might be
addressed. Hartmann and Husband (1974) is the only
treatment to date that has systematically addressed both
genres in one text.
Gray (1989) has posed the question for the USA of the
implications of having more differentiated television
entertainment images of African Americans since the _Cosby
Show_, for example, provided positive images of African
American family life and economic success which contrasted
sharply with the ubiquitous news and current affairs images
that focused almost entirely on crime, social problems, and
the vexations of warzone inner city existence. He raises
the question addressed by a number of other critical
analysts, such as Entman (1990, 1992) and Jhally and Lewis
(1992), of how far the drift of coverage is tilted toward
suggesting that success is now entirely possible for ethnic
minority groups in a post-civil rights era, in a mythically
post- discriminatory world. Consequently, African-Americans
and other ethnic minority group members who have not 'made
it' may be presumed to be suffering the consequences of not
having tried hard enough - a particularly severe moral
failing in the context of the ideology of the American
Dream. Are such media frames characteristic of other
nations?
One of the issues then that media flows research has to
address is whether it suffers from an overly 'rational-
cognitive' academic bias in its tendency to focus on news
and journalistic representations. The underlying
presumption seems sometimes to be that a 'facts vs
non-facts' expose will bring the house of cards tumbling
down, and while we would not wish to discount the merits of
such exposes, or to downplay the rational in favour of mere
assertion, exposes cannot be expected to be overwhelming in
their effects.
Having said that, it is nonetheless the case that news
media are of massive significance in the daily communication
of what purport to be the realities of 'race.' Different
topics may predominate in different national media, with
'immigration' being to the forefront in European news values
over the past three decades, and questions of civil rights
and crime occupying centre stage in the United States, while
other nations' news media may vary again. In Mexico and
Brazil, for example, invisibility continues to be the norm,
with news about White people more or less entirely filling
up the columns and screens (though see Hanchard, 1994a, ch.
6, for an analysis of the contested public definitions in
1988 in Brazil of the celebration of 1888 as the year in
which slavery was abolished there).
If there is a single finding that keeps on being
replicated, it is that events and processes are described
without being explained. Protest and riot are given
dramatic pictures and gritty detail, but their causes are
never made understandable. It might be said with
justification that this is in part a product of the
conventional processes of news gathering, and not a specific
decision to reject explanations in the particular zone of
public life. However, hand-in-hand with this superficiality
goes a steady refusal to put the realities of discrimination
and racism centre stage as news items. In this way, media
assist in the perpetuation of racism by effectively keeping
its harsh realities muffled in the public sphere. Indeed,
much academic discourse concerning the public sphere equally
obliterates the concerns of racially extruded groups from
its analyses (Hanchard, 1994b).
Ultimately, the task of media flows research in
relation to ethnic issues is probably to isolate out the
major constructs utilised in public discourse that refract
and in so doing marginalise the legitimate concerns of
ethnic minority groups -- constructs such as immigration,
crime, loyalty to the state, undue economic power -- and to
connect these to the working relationship between the power
structure and mainstream media. For news analysis in
particular, that power relationship may be said to be
peculiarly significant, though to take different and often
complicated forms depending upon whether reference is being
made to the economic or the political power structure, and
in which society.
For example, Brass (1992) directs our attention to the
powerful impact on ethnic, linguistic, confessional and
nationalist discourses of Gorbachev's and Indira Gandhi's
attempts to relocate power at the centre of their respective
states after a protracted previous period in which power had
been allowed to flow out to republican and state power
structures. In the tendency to media-centrism that quite
often disfigures media studies, it is important to retain
sight of such levels of reality. We tend to focus too
closely sometimes on inter-group relations without reference
to political struggles such as these that may underlie the
eruption of major 'ethnic' upheavals.
The representation of ethnic minorities and the
construction of their marginalised status within society as
natural seeming is but one critically important impact of
the mass media. It is equally important to note and monitor
the role of the media in the social construction of the
dominant ethnic identity, and its melding into the 'imagined
community' (Anderson, 1991) of the nation. The mass media
are essential vehicles for continuous 'invention of
tradition' within the contemporary nation state (Hobsbawm &
Ranger, 1983). Thus, the implications of news and other
genres also need analysis in relation to the construction or
institutionalisation over the long term of seemingly
spontaneous self-understandings of the ethnic majority (to
reiterate a point already made).
Ethnic Minority Media
In recent years, these media have been much better
studied than used to be the case (e.g. Husband & Chouhan,
1985; Downing, 1990; Riggins, 1992; Gooskens 1992; Dates &
Barlow, 1992, 2nd ed.; Abdallah, 1993; Batty, 1993; Fox,
1993; Husband, 1994b; Rodriguez, in press). They used to be
considered purely marginal, barely worthy of analysis, and
also typically as social movement media. Let us briefly
note why their re-evaluation is important for present
purposes.
Firstly, their academic marginalisation was part of the
more general problem of researchers' over-fixation on
dominant mainstream media. These were either studied as
givens, in a politically conservative framework, or they
were studied as mass hegemonic institutions in a critical
framework. Either way, power was implicitly presumed to be
exclusively concentrated at the vertex.
Secondly, to some degree the democratisation of certain
technical means of communication, whether in desktop
publishing or cheap video-cameras or access television, has
opened up a range of communicative possibilities that have
not existed in quite the same way since the radical press
was essentially overtaken by the commercial press in the
1840s in Britain and the United States, or since cinema
became a major commercial enterprise in the 1920s. Thus,
albeit with considerable distribution problems compared to
corporately owned media, alternative media have flourished
much more evidently than hitherto in the last twenty years
(cf. Enzensberger, 1970; Downing, 1984).
Thirdly, however, for media flows research these
smaller scale media are very important, for the following
two reasons: (a) they often deal with issues long before
mainstream media get around to them, because they are closer
to the ground; and (b) their audience/readership is somewhat
more likely to respond to their information by some form of
political organising than is the larger, less politicised
audience of the mainstream media. This second point should
not be overstated, however, since among ethnic minority
media today are some which are exceedingly well financed and
politically quite conservative and suspicious of social
movements of any kind.
Thus in terms of the objectives of media flows
research, it is arguably particularly important to include
some leading examples of ethnic minority group media, both
to ensure a full spectrum of media is analysed, and in
order, through comparative analyses to have a number of
specific examples of how mainstream media have needlessly
failed to live up to their self-proclaimed goals.
Migrants
Migration has been, and remains, a major phenomenon of
international and inter-regional relations. Driven by
political and economic forces that are subject to long term
shifts in international relative economic development and
attendant shifts in intra-national transformations of the
economic formation of manufacturing and service industries,
migration patterns continually change. Additionally,
factors such as famine and war can produce rapid and
extensive changes in patterns of migration. As Appleyard
(1988) has noted in a major review of migration, it is
necessary to clearly delineate temporary and permanent flows
as the impacts on sending and receiving countries of each
type of migration may be very different.
Whilst such a distinction is important it is not always
easy to attain. Current refugees may be capable of
returning home, or like Palestinians may face prolonged
exile. And patterns of cyclical economic migration may,
through changing political circumstances, be transformed
into settled ethnic minority communities (Castles, 1984).
However, despite these difficulties we have in this article
chosen to discuss settled ethnic minority populations and
migrant populations in separate sections.
One apparent distinction which might meaningfully be
made between categories of migrants is that between those
who are economic migrants, predominantly working in a
pattern of contract or guest-worker migration, and asylum
seekers or refugees who are fleeing from their country of
citizenship. However, once again the apparent
reasonableness of such a distinction is not amenable to
unambiguous implementation. As has already been indicated
above persons engaged as contract workers may become de
facto settled ethic minority communities (Castles, 1984;
Papademetriou, 1988) where their contractual regulation is
not operated under the most rigid control as, for example,
it is in some Middle Eastern countries. And the distinction
between asylum seeker and economic migrant has become one of
the most politicised judgements in contemporary
inter-national relations (Egan & Storey, 1992; Fernhout,
1993). Despite these very real analytic difficulties it
does remain possible to speak meaningfully of refugees as
distinct from contract labour.
Refugees and Asylum Seekers
The movement of people from one state to another as a
result of political or religious persecution, or because of
an immanent threat to their life and well-being occasioned
by war or famine is not new (Weh, 1987). In Europe in this
century we have seen huge movements of refugees (Widgren,
1989) with, for example, half-a-million persons being
re-settled after the 1917 Russian Revolution and ten million
moving from Eastern to Western Europe after the Second World
War. However, that migration was over a limited
geographical space and the refugees were seen as virtual
neighbours with similar cultural traditions. However, a
large segment of contemporary refugee movement is
international and inter-continental. Whilst cross-border
migration of refugees is still very evident in Africa, South
Asia, and Central America there is also now a relatively
uncoordinated flow of international refugees, many of whom
seek asylum in the developed nations of the world. And
speaking of Europe, Gallagher (1989, p 593) has noted that
these asylum seekers; 'In contrast to the Eastern Europeans
... were of different races, followed different religions
and were otherwise seen as presenting potential problems.'
Indeed we have seen in the last decade an emerging, and now
established, policy among Western developed nations in their
construction of policies aimed at minimising asylum seekers
entry into their territory. Whether it be the British
Government's construction of detention conditions
reminiscent of World War II concentration camps for `Boat
people' in Hong Kong, or the Australian Government's
detention of 'illegal immigrants' in Port Headland, there is
a prevalence of what Weh (1987) described as 'a policy of
dissuasion.' This is a policy which aims to make the
process of asylum seeking so difficult, distressing and
unlikely to be successful as to dissuade potential refugees
from leaving their country. Since the principle of _non
refoulement_, Article 31 (1) of the Geneva Convention,
requires Contracting States to refrain from expelling or
returning refugees to territories where their lives or
freedom would be threatened, then the obligation to grant
asylum falls upon the country the asylum seeker first
enters: their country of first asylum. Consequently the
policy of dissuasion includes strategies to prevent first
entry -- as, for example, penalties upon air lines -- and a
practice of returning asylum seekers who have stopped in
transit from their own country back to their country of
first asylum. Thus intergovernmental co-operation in the
politics of dissuasion has proceeded at a pace which
reflects the racialized sensibilities associated with the
issue. Indeed Fernhout (1993) has argued that the 1990
Dublin convention on asylum seeking within the member states
of the European Union violates the Refugee convention (see
also Egan & Storey, 1992). It is certainly reasonable to
assert that there has over the last decade been active
collusion between the developed nations of the world to
renege on their obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention
for Refugees and the New York Protocol of 1967. The
emergence of a consensus on the inter-national community's
collective responsibility for the problem of refugees,
identified by Carrillo in 1987 in positive terms, has
regrettably been consolidated into the meanest form of
concerted regulation and exclusion.
The concern of Governments to exclude asylum seekers
has provided a vehicle for the rehearsal of nationalist
self-interest and ethnocentric beliefs and values. The
threat to national economic integrity through an unbridled
'flood' of 'welfare scroungers' and unqualified and
superfluous 'economic migrants' resulted in a pattern of
frequent Governmental denial of the authenticity of the
asylum seekers claims for admittance. In this context the
press echoing of Governments' definition of asylum seekers
as 'economic migrants' contributed substantially to
formulating popular response to particular asylum seekers
(see e.g. van Dijk, 1988). Similarly the definition of
asylum seekers as 'illegal entrants' places their claim for
generous and humane consideration in a particularly negative
context. Given the circumstances of duress and urgency
under which asylum seekers typically quit their country, it
is hardly surprising that they should often fail to meet the
formal requirements relating to documentation upon entering
a country. However, as the case of Tamil refugees in the
mid-1980's indicated, this reality did not impinge upon
their labelling as 'illegal' (see van Dijk, 1988 re the
Netherlands, Gordon and Rosenberg, 1989 re the United
Kingdom).
The reporting of asylum seekers has not of course been
unambiguously negative: where the source of their plight
was ideologically compatible with official sympathy then the
definition of their legitimacy has been appropriately
modified. Thus the Vietnamese 'boat-people' fleeing
Communist oppression or East African Asians fleeing 'a
crazed African brute' were negotiable genuine cases. And
until recently persons fleeing the hardship of Eastern
European Communism were _prima facie_ genuine refugees
worthy of the fullest possible support. However, as Miles
has noted, times have changed
For the states of western Europe (not to mention
the USA), the value of the Iron Curtain was not
only that it served as a symbol of the freedom
supposedly 'inherent' in capitalist societies. It
also ensured that only very limited numbers of the
victims of totalitarianism were able to flee to
'freedom.' Those who did succeed in making the
perilous journey were accorded the political and
legal status of _refugee_ and, in this guise, they
played an important role in the ideological
struggle to legitimate capitalism.
Now that the victims of communism are 'free', they
are able to experience the contradictions of
bourgeois freedom. Within the states of the EC,
there is great concern that they might exercise
their freedom by migrating to western Europe to
escape the privations of the primitive
accumulation that is now occurring in central and
eastern Europe (Miles, 1993, p. 461).
In a concluding summary of the role of the press in
reporting refugees van Dijk (1991) notes that the diversity
within the press operates within a limited ideological
framework. Consequently he notes that alternative
interpretative frameworks in which refugee and immigration
issues may be viewed in relation to neo-colonialism, racism,
and the relations between the rich 'North' and the poor
'South' are rare. Certainly within the contemporary
politics of the European Union with its 'Fortress Europe'
border policy and neurotic concern with a European cultural
project, which incorporates media policy, (see Husband,
1993) this is hardly surprising. The rise of neo-Fascism
and extreme racist sentiments is an unequivocal phenomenon
in contemporary Europe (Ford, 1990; Harris, 1990; Cheles et
al., 1991) and is exacerbated by the lack of political will
to confront it in any meaningful way. In this context the
media in their populist right wing mode have been actively
promoting racist and xenophobic sentiments, and the critical
response and analysis of the broadsheet quality press has
been compromised and ineffectual. And in television
reporting the occasional documentary cannot compensate for
the minimalist, episodic coverage of routine reporting. A
depressing summary of the European situation is provided by
Joly who has observed that:
The media generally exacerbate the situation.
Restrictive measures and declarations in turn
enhance hostility and prejudice against foreigners
and refugees, and these hostile attitudes appear
to be given some justification when political
leaders confirm them, or fail to condemn them.
Thus the circle continues, spinning into greater
hatred and prejudice. (1992, p.118)
Refugees are of course not only subject to being
reported and represented by the media but also have
expectations of the media; and given their situation
informational needs rank as a high priority. A 1987 Unesco
project on Media and Refugees provided a comparative study
of the communication environment of refugees in a number of
regions of the world (Unesco, 1987; and Husband 1989). The
regional reports which were the basis of this study
demonstrate the very wide diversity of circumstances under
which refugees existed. These included long-term residence
in refugee camps with a modicum of stable material infra-
structure and short-lived residence in crisis camp
accommodation; in both circumstances with large numbers of
fellow refugees who are almost totally dependent on external
aid. Or some refugees find themselves in small family units
widely dispersed in rural areas of the receiving society;
whilst others find themselves relatively well integrated
into their new situation, where they may enjoy a large
degree of autonomy, personal status and economic success.
This diversity in conditions and experience must be
reflected in the differing information needs of refugees.
Of course, the way in which a society provides
information _about_ refugees to the majority population is
one of the major determinants of the provision of
information _for_ refugees. If, as for example van Dijk
(1988, 1991) has indicated, locating refugees in the context
of past imperial domination, current neo-colonialism or
racist ideologies is not tenable, then the historic and
current circumstances which have generated the refugee
situation must of necessity be partial and distorting. If
in addition the receiving society simultaneously rehearses
it's tolerance and generosity in accepting refugees then
there is created a reciprocal demand that refugees show
gratitude, rather than quibble about the terms of their
acceptance and settlement. This scenario represents a
significant constraint upon the discourse which refugees may
enter into with the host society. In addition the
acceptance of refugees, whilst in reality an act of generous
altruism, may also generate a degree of political tension
between the receiving state and the country of their flight.
Consequently, given factors such as these, both the
reporting about refugees and the provision of information
for and by them is very often subject to Government
intervention and to political forces operating within the
host society.
Husband (1989) in synthesising the implications of the
regional studies gathered under the Media and Refugees
project identified a number of major factors relating to the
informational needs of refugees. These included a necessary
identification of target audiences and the use of media
appropriate to their circumstances and experience.
Informational needs were seen as falling into a number of
categories reflecting the different priorities of particular
stages of the arrival and settlement process. Clearly the
informational needs on first arrival are highly specific and
pragmatic and related to the immediate anxieties of survival
and adaptation to the strange environment. Subsequent
informational needs reflect the desire to acquire cultural
and social competence in the receiving society in order to
claim and exercise personal autonomy. And simultaneously
there is a need to retain a communicative link with their
'home' country as both a necessary means of sustaining the
viability of return and as an important mechanism of
maintaining collective identity whilst in exile.
Asylum seekers and refugees are continuing distressing
phenomenon in our contemporary world. Many of the poorer
nations of the world carry a disproportionate share of the
social and economic burden of providing asylum, whilst the
wealthier nations employ the serendipitous consequences of
geography and draconian policies robustly enforced to
minimise their role as receiving countries. The role of the
mass media in sustaining an ignorant fatalism in regard to
the origin of refugee crises, and a popular veneer of
humanitarian concern, massaged by voluntarism and state
tokenism, should not be underestimated. Too often the abuse
of human rights in creating refugee situations, and the
collusive denial of the expression of responsibilities under
human rights international instruments, are both perpetrated
and legitimated through an ideological cocktail of
nationalism, racism, and economic self-interest. The
communicative rights of refugees cannot be detached from the
broader context of human rights agendas which define the
refugee's status and condition. As the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees, Mrs. Sadako Ogata said in her address to the
1993 session of the Commission on Human Rights.
The issue of human rights and the problems of
refugees are so inextricably linked that it is
hardly possible to discuss one without referring
to the other. Human rights violations are a major
cause of refugee flows and also a major obstacle
to the solution of refugee problems through
voluntary repatriation. More positively,
safe-guarding human rights is the best way to
_prevent_ conditions that force people to become
refugees; respect for human rights is a key
element in the _protection_ of refugees in their
country of asylum; and improved observance of
human rights standards is often critical for the
solution of refugees problems by enabling refugees
to return safely home.
Guest-Workers - Contract Labour
With the dramatic changes in the European economy in
the 1970s and the rapid introduction of 'Immigration stop'
policies throughout western European states, there have been
two decades now of virtually no primary migration for
employment into these states. However, contract labour and
patterns of seasonal migration still exist as major features
of the labour market in other continents (Appleyard, 1988).
And within western Europe there are still those who find
themselves in anomalous situations like the Turkish
community in Germany. As Brubaker (1989) has indicated, the
fundamental distinction in migrant situations is not that
between citizen and non-citizen, but that between immigrant
and non-immigrant. It is the immigrant status with
'permanent resident' qualification (USA), or 'indefinite
leave to remain' (UK), or 'Carte de Resident' (France) which
most fundamentally distinguishes the social and labour
situation of non-citizen from non-citizen. The non-citizen
on contract, or the undocumented alien, lacks the
substantive citizenship rights usually available to the
recognised immigrant. It is the latter who have no need of
special permission to work and if unemployed do not face
expulsion. The economic, political, and social
circumstances of the contract guest worker are routinely
heavily qualified by the terms of their entry into the
country and their terms of employment. Unlike naturalised
ethnic minorities and communities of migrants with permanent
resident status these workers are not conceived of as
communities by the receiving country. Their formal
transitory status renders them as not relevant to policies
of assimilation or integration which may be deemed
appropriate to stable multi-ethnic politics.
In multi-ethnic societies with stable ethnic minority
communities it has frequently been the case that the state
has developed information strategies aimed at facilitating
the integration of the minority community into the receiving
society. A Unesco supported comparative study of 'The Role
of Information in the Realisation of the Human Rights of
Migrant Workers' (Hujanen, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989) provides
comparative examples of such policies. Typically such
communication policies have employed a definition of
multiculturalism which has privileged the cultural identity
of 'the nation' and has promoted an informational flow which
obviated addressing power relations and racism in the
multi-ethnic society (Husband, 1994a). Less frequently the
receiving society, or more accurately the dominant ethnic
community, has initiated policies aimed at facilitating the
autonomous communicative activity of ethnic minorities.
However, here too the dominant ethnic communities concern to
protect their privileged status has heavily compromised such
initiatives (e.g. Ananthakrishnan, 1994; Seneveratne, 1993;
Bovenkerk-Teerink, 1994).
The status and temporal ambiguity of contract labourers
has rendered them marginal to such policies, or has
engendered communication policies premised upon a concern to
facilitate their return to their 'homeland,' as in the case
of the Federal Republic of Germany's policies toward
'Gastarbeiters.' For such migrants informal social networks
are likely to be a critical element in their informational
environment (Romero et al., 1988). Indeed for some contract
workers their rights of assembly and freedom of
communication may be heavily circumscribed and their
capacity for social and cultural expression be severely
limited. Thus it is important to note that the Unesco
supported programme had as its starting point and guiding
ethos a human rights basis for its concern with the
communication environment of migrants. This starting point
lay in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and
Co-operation in Europe (1975) in which the special needs of
migrant workers were acknowledged in confirming their right
'to receive, as far as possible, regular information in
their own language, covering both their country of origin
and the host country.' At an early point in the programme
Hujanen (1984) generated a brief listing of other
international documents which supported or elaborated upon
this recommendation. The existence of such a human rights
agenda is clearly significant in linking the communicative
needs of migrant workers to a wider context. Specifically
for the analysis presented here it serves to underline the
necessity of linking the analysis of the communicative
environment of migrants to the generic debate surrounding
the democratisation of the media and the right to
communicate (e.g. Nordenstreng, 1984; Roach, 1990; Husband,
1994b). Additionally it points to the responsibility of
states to provide an equitable communications environment
for all within its territory. Legal definitions of
citizenship and ethnocentric and racial conceptions of
national identity are not adequate reasons for denying the
moral obligations owed by the state to all resident within
its territory (see Carens, 1989).
Indigenous Groups
The use of the concept of indigenous groups immediately
raises a number of issues. Notions of aboriginality,
territoriality, and nationhood all immediately take on a
temporal and historical relevance. The relation of people
in terms of a collective ethnic identity, their relation to
their native land, and the primacy of their claim to
autonomous self-government all take on meaning only in
relation to a parallel history of invasion, immigration,
settlement, and the subsequent resting of political and
economic power from the indigenous peoples by immigrants to
_their_ territory. Indeed the history of patterns of
settlement itself leads to a hierarchy of claims to
determining the ethnic authenticity of the nation. For
example, the Anglo-fragment societies constructed through
British colonial expansion have a strong sense of founding
'charter groups' who 'made' these countries. As Elliott and
Fleras (1990) say of the Canadian situation, the challenge
presented by immigration . .. 'is the challenge of balancing
the Canadian equation: charter groups, aboriginal peoples,
and newcomers' (Elliott & Fleras, 1990 p. 53).
The process of invasion/immigration, domination, and
legitimation of the new order has typically resulted in a
marginalization, and often planned or de facto cultural
devastation, of the indigenous peoples. Subsequent patterns
of immigration have been under the control of, and in the
interest of, the Charter Groups, with the aboriginal peoples
being further squeezed territorially and politically through
this accommodation between the Charter Groups and newcomers.
Not surprisingly the multicultural policies of the 1970s and
80s have reflected the primacy of this relationship, with
the labour needs of the national economy modifying the
Charter Groups old ethnocentric sentiments and racist
policies in order to sustain growth; and consequently there
has been active intervention by the state in seeking to
negotiate 'harmonious community relations (see for example
Li, 1990 re Canada; Castles et al., 1990 and Pettman, 1992
re Australia). Within multicultural policies the indigenous
peoples constitute an awkward category. Their historical
oppression, both economically and culturally, typically
leaves them with a demography unlike that of the original
usurpers or the more recent immigrant populations. Like the
Samis in Norway, the Aboriginals in Australia, and the
Native Peoples of North America they are often
geographically and socially isolated and have a
disadvantaged relation to both the labour market and
political institutions. Not surprisingly indigenous peoples
have chosen to detach themselves from the collusive
invention of national identity implicit in the invaders
multiculturalism (see Frideres, 1990 re Canada; Lippmann,
1981; Stephenson & Ratnapala, 1993 re Australia). Given
this context it is not surprising that indigenous peoples
should experience a particularly fraught communications
environment.
The representation of indigenous peoples in the
majority media is an expression of their incorporation into
the foundation myths of the contemporary state. There is,
for example, the 'pre-modern' noble-savage whose simple
certainties and arcane knowledge compare favourable with the
sophistication, rationality, and complexity of our current
era. Whether it be in the mystic stoicism of Nordic
_Veiviseren_ or the gentle nobility and bush craft of David
Gulpilil in _Walkabout_ these representations provide a
non-threatening imagery dislocated from contemporary
realities. In a valuable text Jennings (1993) notes that:
Essential representations of Aborigines ignore the
larger social system within which Aborigines exist
and by which they are dominated (1993, p.18).
And at a later point Jennings (1993, p. 31) notes that
Aboriginal culture is invested with meaning only in relation
to European culture. This reciprocal definition of self and
other can be articulated in relation to any number of
salient agendas and typically maps the fault lines in
contemporary society where existing norms are contradictory
and alienating: sexuality and the relation to work being
but two of the more obvious (see Davies, 1984; Husband,
1988).
Of course the other major form of representation of
indigenous groups is through their invisibility in
mainstream media, outside of their visibility as 'problems'
or 'victims' in the news media. Langton writing of
Australia in 1992 notes that 'Aboriginal and Islander people
were still virtually invisible on three commercial
television networks' (Langton, 1993, p. 21). This was a
situation confirmed by Bell (1992). It is the interactive
impact of indigenous peoples absence from routine broadcast
media and the particular and narrow, range of iconography
attached to them in the news, and occasionally in film, that
shapes their perception amongst majority communities and
contributes to the alienation of indigenous people from the
wider society.
When we consider the participation of indigenous
peoples in media production a number of issues become
salient. Almost ironically one of the issues is
essentialist claims _within_ the indigenous groups over who
is able to 'authentically' generate representations of their
collective experience and contemporary politics. In
Langton's words
There is a naive belief that Aboriginal people
will make 'better' representations of us, simply
because being Aboriginal gives 'greater'
understanding. This belief is based on an ancient
and universal feature of racism: the assumption
of the undifferentiated _other_. More
specifically, the assumption is that all
Aborigines are alike and equally understand each
other, without regard to cultural variation,
history, gender, sexual preference and so on. It
is a demand for censorship: there is a 'right'
way to be Aboriginal, and any Aboriginal film or
video producer will necessarily make a 'true'
representation of 'Aboriginality.'
This thinking is as much based on fear of
difference as is white Australian racism (1993, p.
27).
Given the centuries of oppression and resistance to
culture, and physical obliteration it is hardly surprising
that in-group social identity should have become invested
with all the accumulated anxiety and sensitivity associated
with resistance and survival (cf. Turner, 1987; Gilroy,
1987, 1993). Nor is it surprising that it may have
incorporated something of the category -- defining variables
of the dominant oppressor. And, in the contemporary
'pork-barrel' funding of ethnic politics, it is also
probable that essentialist claims have pecuniary and
political advantage. In a context of endemic under-funding
competition for the ethnic-dollar can be expected to be
acute (e.g. Hussein 1994).
That some funding does exist is critical to both
majority multiculturalism and indigenous peoples' media
strategies. Such funding may be directly for indigenous
peoples media activity, or indirectly attached through
clauses in franchising commercial media. The former
reflects the demography of relatively small, often isolated,
communities and the latter indicates an intention to
'mainstream' provision. Both options are inherently
defensible. Experience indicates some of the difficulties
that may be encountered.
Efforts to generate autonomous indigenous community
media have faced a number of problems. A recurrent issue is
their geographical dispersal and the linguistic diversity
and the variation in life styles within indigenous
populations. Ananthakrishanan (1994) notes that only about
2000 Samis can read and write their language and that it is
spoken fluently only by some sections of the community. And
additionally he points out that whilst the Samis are widely
seen as nomadic people of northern Scandinavia their densest
population of 8,000 people is in Oslo. Equally Langton
(1993, p.11) speaking of Australian Aborigines distinguishes
two broad regions: 'settled Australia' of provincial towns
and major cities 'where a myriad of small Aboriginal
communities and populations reside with a range of histories
and cultures': and 'remote Australia' 'where most of the
tradition-oriented Aboriginal cultures are located.' Such a
dichotomy is of course a gross generalisation but it does
address the wide diversity of experience and world view
within indigenous populations. In Langton's own words:
In a very general sense, the film and video
productions by Aboriginal people in those two
regions are quite different. They are grounded in
different cultural bases, histories and
socio-political conditions. (1993, p. 12)
This diversity reflects itself not only in different
agendas and aesthetics being brought to media production but
it also significantly fragments potential audiences and may
have serious implications for the financial viability of
particular media initiatives. The two processes of
production and consumption are of course not independent.
Langton provides a valuable discussion of the phenomenon,
indicating for example that in 'remote' Australia much of
the work is produced by community groups for consumption
within the community. Notably
A significant feature of that production in
traditional groups has to do with the involvement
of those people who have the authority to produce
the image or tell the story. Aboriginal Law
governs wider production in much the same way as
in any other area of life (Langton, 1993 p. 13).
That Aboriginal groups in 'settled' Australia have not
been able to achieve the same degree of control over content
and dissemination is a reflection of their different legal
status outside of areas governed by Traditional Law and
accessing media with different patterns of control and
ownership. The BRACS (Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal
Communities Scheme) matched technology to need. Although as
Batty (1993) has shown, providing the technological means to
remote indigenous communities is not sufficient to guarantee
a successful enterprise; the community's prior experience of
mass media is an additional significant factor.
That the nature of the funding base is equally critical
was indicated by the struggle for Aboriginal control over
the Remote Commercial Television Station at Alice Springs
(Batty, 1993). Having won a prolonged struggle for control
of the franchise, Imparja found that its commercial
prerogatives had fundamentally undermined its aspirations of
serving Aboriginal audiences. Batty estimated that in the
whole of 1991 only 6.5 hours of programming in Aboriginal
languages was transmitted. And in Norway Ananthakrishnan
(1994) has recorded the funding difficulties of Sami radio
operating within the Community Radio sector. And Fox (1993)
has pointed to the greater availability of radio as a medium
for the broadcast activities of Maoris in Aotearoa (New
Zealand) given its much lower start up and operating costs
compared with television. This is a situation echoed in
Australia by Seneviratne (1993) who has identified
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community radio as the
cornerstone of the rapidly developing indigenous media
sector. A significant factor in the Australian situation is
in fact the independent political identity of the indigenous
peoples and the state's specific recognition of their unique
position through the creation and funding of the Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). ATSIC has,
for example, funded a secretariat and operations budget for
the National Indigenous Media Association of Australia
(NIMAA founded in 1992) and has heavily supported indigenous
media centres and the BRACS programme previously mentioned.
This is distinctly unlike the situation of Samis in Norway
or Maoris in New Zealand, and is an important reminder of
the very different circumstances of indigenous communities
in different states.
Funding of technology is not the same as funding
production, and the interests represented in extending the
reach of telecommunications and broadcast systems are not
coterminous with the interests of the intended beneficiary
audiences. Capital grants for start up technology have a
different logic and financial trajectory to commitments to
sustain indigenous production; as the situation in remote
Australia (Seneviratne, 1993; Batty, 1993), Alaska (Daley &
James, 1992) and Northern Canada (Valaskakis, 1992) in
different ways have indicated. And in all instances the
indigenous peoples have shown a desire, and often an
ability, to exercise control of local programming.
Indigenous peoples communication environment is closely
related to their economic, demographic and political
characteristics. The total neglect, or wanton abuse, of
indigenous peoples does not have the explicit consensual
support of earlier colonising ideologies of racial
superiority or confident assertions of _terra nulius_. The
latter part of the twentieth century has seen an
international recognition of the distinctive identities of
indigenous peoples and explicit concern with their human
rights: as for example in the 1993 Vienna Declaration
following The World Conference of Human Rights (paras
28-32). In a number of 'settler' societies these
international sentiments and the political mobilisation of
their indigenous peoples have become focused into an awkward
renegotiation of the relationship between the charter groups
and the indigenous peoples. This is often associated with a
broader renegotiation of national identity: Australia and
the Mabo case being a particular instance (Bennett et al.,
1992; Rowse, 1993). Thus indigenous peoples can currently
be seen to seek to exploit contemporary communications
technologies to defend their identity and community whilst
simultaneously trying to achieve controlled access to the
wider society. Regardless of the technology or the locality
it is control of production and distribution which is
recurrently central among their concerns.
The Ethnic Minority Presence
Within the Mainstream Media
There ought to be no such concept as 'mainstream media'
in functionally egalitarian multi-ethnic societies: that is
not to say there would be no ethnically distinctive media.
However, the national print or broadcast media would, like
the society itself, be multi-ethnic in staffing, programming
values and content. They would not, as now, be essentially
coterminous with the aesthetics and interests of the
dominant ethnic groups, charter or otherwise. At present
the conception of mainstream media inevitably juxtaposes a
hegemonic orthodoxy against a problematic heterogeneous
range of ethnic identities and politics. To speak of a
society enjoying the complementary benefits of multi-ethnic
_and_ dedicated ethnic media is not compatible with speaking
of 'mainstream' and 'ethnic minority' media.
However, in the context of the current mainstream media
the ubiquitous penetration of the values and interests of
the dominant ethnic communities is apparent. Speaking of
the Australian situation Seneviratne has identified the
significance of accent as a sufficient hindrance to
participation in the mainstream. He observes that
Many highly skilled and experienced radio
broadcasters of ethnic backgrounds have found the
ABC's concept of 'style and standard' has been a
formidable barrier as far as their access to the
ABC's airways is concerned, because unless you
have an 'Australian' (Anglo-Celtic) accent, you
are judged to be 'unprofessional.'
ABC applies a peculiar brand of programme
standards where an 'ethnic' accent is okay if you
are the person being interviewed, but the same
accent is deemed to be not of broadcasting
standard, if you want to be the interviewer, the
presenter or the narrator of the programme
(Seneviratne, 1993, p. 69).
This certainly has a close similarity to British
television which has a significant number of 'ethnic
minority' news readers and journalists who seemly are
expected to compensate for their deviant ethnicity by having
ultra-orthodox BBC, or received pronunciation, accents.
This is a phenomenon echoed in Bovernkerk-Teerink's (1994)
analysis of broadcasting in the Netherlands.
She also points to a further phenomenon that may shape
the experience of ethnic minority broadcasters working in
the mainstream: namely the construction within the
mainstream of dedicated ethnic minority slots within which
ethnic minority personnel become ghettoised. Her
observations relating to this situation are distressing and
worthy of comparative study. For example, she reports that
Ethnic minority people have been hired to work for
the 'migrants tape' only, and their specialisation
is held against them. This shows their marginal
status. ... One minority employee talks about
himself as a 'language coolie' and feels that he
has been hired for his ethnic background only, and
not for any particular qualities as a broadcaster
(1994, pp. 48-49).
A further significant aspect of the mainstream
broadcasters pragmatic employment of minority personnel is
identified by Downing (1994) and Ngui (1994). They note the
existence of a situation in which highly visible ethnic
minority broadcasters find themselves in effect fronting for
institutions within which ethnic minority persons are
singularly absent from executive positions. This particular
form of strategic tokenism places those ethnic minority
professionals in an invidious position both personally and
professionally. Personally they may feel isolated in a
working environment in which they remain permanently
'exotic,' and professionally they may feel compromised
through having to persistently work against the grain of the
hegemonic political and cultural values which are normative
within the system. And indeed, as Downing indicates, this
ethnic veneering of broadcasting institutions has further
implications for prospective ethnic minority employees, for
his analysis of the American situation reveals networking to
be a critical element in media career building. He
concludes that:
... if there is one conclusion that may be drawn,
it is that the presence or absence of members of
ethnic minority groups in all echelons of the
communications industry is not only vital in terms
of employment justice, and is not only crucial in
terms of non-racist and anti- racist media
representation and discourse, but is practically
speaking _pivotal_ to the proper future employment
of members of ethnic minority groups because of
the networking character of finding employment in
most if not all sections of the industry (Downing,
1994, pp. 36-7).
One option which ethnic minority media workers have
exercised has been to operate outside of the mainstream
media, but to service its needs on a contract basis. This
provides for a large degree of organisational autonomy and a
strong sense of ethnic solidarity within the working
environment. Clearly the mainstream is vulnerable to this
strategy since whilst it needs to control its ethnic
minority input it also has a need of the linguistic and
cultural skills of ethnic minority professionals; and of
their capacity to gain access to situations of conflict and
stress from which mainstream professionals may well be
excluded by physical threat or their cultural incompetence.
Both IM' media in France (Stubbs, 1994) and Mana Maori Media
in New Zealand (Fox, 1993) are examples of this strategy.
However, as Stubbs (1994) reports, this is not a strategy
without its costs and tensions. Retaining a strong ethnic
identity and credibility within the ethnic community and the
careerist temptations of growing 'professional' success in
servicing the mainstream are not easily reconciled.
Maintaining an activist commitment whilst simultaneously
negotiating professional and commercial success is a
delicate process.
As in every other area of the interface of ethnicity
with the operation and impact of media systems the
mainstream media present a focus for the competing interests
of a dominant ethnic hegemony and diverse ethnic minority
interests. Ethnic minority communities are increasingly
effectively penetrating the mainstream, whilst
simultaneously threatening it by developing vibrant and
viable ethnic minority media. This is a struggle in which
the often ambiguous and neurotic identity of the dominant
elite is vulnerable to internal doubt, and to the competing
and autonomously disruptive impact of their own commercial
imperatives perpetually in pursuit of an evolving fragmented
audience. Pragmatic flexibility within the mainstream and
coherent ethnic mobilisation by ethnic minorities would seem
at present to offer a prospect of evolutionary change for
the better.
Conclusion
The research reflected in this article demonstrates the
complexity of the issues involved in examining ethnicity,
racism and the media. Whilst specific variables may
fruitfully be identified, and for pragmatic purposes be
given independent analysis, the reality remains that it is
only through an understanding of their contingent
interaction that an adequate understanding may be achieved.
Whilst there is a great deal of material examining the
representation of ethnic minorities within the media its
visibility and impressive quantity does not allow for such
research to be regarded as redundant. The monitoring of the
ever shifting metamorphoses of stereotypes and their
incorporation in new and distinctive political discourse
remains an important and continuing task. A comparative
analysis of this process in relation to material, like the
_Cosby Show_, transmitted into widely differing national and
ethnic contexts is to be recommended.
The literature on cultural imperialism (Tomlinson,
1992) has appropriately focused attention upon international
media flows, and yet the research reviewed above indicates
the importance of monitoring intra-national flows across
ethnic boundaries. And as the case of indigenous peoples
amply demonstrates the intra-ethnic heterogeneity of world
view, aesthetics and production capacity must also be
reflected in analysis and research. The role of ethnic
minority persons as agents of production and dissemination
in the mass media requires urgent attention as a corrective
to their being cast in the role of passive audiences and as
a corrective to naive assumptions regarding uni-directional
media flows. Even a cursory glance at the pop music
industry is sufficient to sense the complex interplay of
creative market forces across national and ethnic
boundaries. The cinema and literature offer further
comparable instances, and the television industry in its
deregulated and increasingly globalised form demands
systematic comparative research. In all of these areas
management and employment practices within media industries
are essential aspects of media performance which are
critical in an examination of racism and xenophobia within
media industries. Here racism may be tapped in its most
subtle and gross modes of expression.
The conceptual challenge of theorising racism,
xenophobia and ethnicity has not been addressed in this
article, as this would require a major review in its own
right. However, given the extensive scholarly and
experiential literature in this area, with its wide
interdisciplinary sweep and rich geographical range, this is
a challenge which cannot be set aside. This is particularly
so since the arguments are often conflictual in their origin
and expression, and are explicitly contributions to a
politicised area of research and debate, there is no easy
consensual framework for analysis which may be unthinkingly
coopted. The interplay of racism, ethnicity, and the media
requires an interdisciplinary analysis which permanently
sees the part in relation to the whole.
Endnotes
[1] In the 19th and 20th centuries, with the massive
movements of populations across the planet from field to
city, immigration scares have been a recurrent form of moral
panic, from Oklahomans moving to California in the 1930s to
Jews trying to flee to Britain in the same decade to Tamils
trying to flee to the Netherlands (Van Dijk, 1988, ch. 4),
or currently Haitians and Cubans and Mexicans entering the
USA; the list is endless, but see below under migrant
workers for more on this theme.
[2] In turn, this raises questions concerning the
significance of a seeming improvement in the representation
of an ethnic minority group. Jakubowicz et al. (1994),
without addressing anti-semitism as such, discuss this more
general issue in the context of multi-culturalist
broadcasting policies in contemporary Australia. See
further the sub-topic on partial and inflected
representations below.
References
Abdallah, M.H. (1993) L'agence IM'media met les pieds dans
le paysage de l'immigration en Europe. In C. Frachon
and M. Vargaftig (Eds.), Televisions d'Europe et
Immigration (pp. 81-93). Paris: Institut National De
L'Audiovisuel.
Ananthakrishnan, S.I. (1994). The development of local
radio and ethnic minority initiatives in Norway. In C.
Husband (Ed.), A richer vision: The development of
ethnic minority media in Western democracies. London:
UNESCO/John Libbey.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. London: Verso.
Appleyard, R. (1988). International migration today.
Paris: UNESCO.
Bachollet, R., Debost, J.-B., Lelieur, A.-C., Peyriere,
M.-C. (1992). Negripub: L'image des Noirs dans la
publicite. Paris: Editions Somogy.
Batty, P. (1993). Singing the electric: Aboriginal
television in Australia. In Tony Dowmunt (Ed.),
Channels of resistance: Global television and local
empowerment (pp. 106-25). London: British Film
Institute.
Baumann, Z. (1993) Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bell, P. (1992) Multicultural Australia in the media.
Canberra: Office of Multicultural Affairs.
Bennett, T., Buckridge, P., Carter, D. & Mercer, C. (1992)
Celebrating the nation. St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen
and Unwin.
Bovenkerk-Teerink, W. (1994). Ethnic minorities and the
media: The case of the Netherlands. In C. Husband
(Ed.), A richer vision: Ethnic minority media
Production. Paris: UNESCO.
Brass, P.R. (1992). Language and national identity in the
Soviet Union and India. In Alexander J. Motyl (Ed.),
Thinking theoretically about Soviet nationalities:
History and comparison in the study of the USSR (pp.
99-128). New York: Columbia University Press.
Brubaker, W.R. (1989). Immigration and the politics of
citizenship in Europe and North America. New York:
University Press of America.
Carens, J.H. (1989). Membership and morality: Admission
to citizenship in liberal democratic States. In W.R.
Brubaker (Eds), Immigration and the politics of
citizenship in Europe and North America. New York:
University Press of America.
Castles, S., Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., & Morrissey, M.
(1990). Mistaken identity. Sydney: Pluto Press.
Castles, S. (1984) Here for good: Western Europe's new
ethnic minorities. London: Pluto Press.
Cheles, L., Ferguson, R., & Vaughan, M. (1991). Neo-fascism
in Europe. London: Longman.
Daley, P.J., & James, B. (1992). Ethnic broadcasting in
Alaska: The failure of a participatory model. In S.H.
Riggins (Ed.), Ethnic minority media (pp. 23-43).
Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.
Dates, J., & Barlow, W. (Eds.) (1992) 2nd edition. Split
image: African Americans and the mass media.
Washington DC: Howard University Press.
Davies, C. (1984). Commentary on Anton C. Zijderveld's
Trent report on The Sociology of Humour and Laughter.
Current Sociology, Vol. 32(1), 142-157.
Downing, J.D.H. (1994) Communications training programmes
for members of ethnic minority groups in the United
States of America: An overview. In C. Husband (Ed.),
A richer vision: The development of ethnic minority
Media in western democracies (pp. 20-37). London:
UNESCO/John Libbey.
Downing, J. (1975). The (balanced) white view. In Charles
Husband (Ed.), White media and black Britain (pp.
90-137). London: Arrow Books, Hutchinson.
Downing, J. (1980). The media machine. London: Pluto
Press.
Downing, J. (1984). Radical media: The political
experience of alternative communication. Boston, MA:
South End Press.
Downing, J. (1985). Coillons ... shryned in an hogges
toord': British news media discourse on 'race.' In
Teun A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse and Communication
(pp. 295-323). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Downing, J. (1988) The Cosby Show and American racial
discourse. In Teun A. van Dijk and Geneva
Smitherman-Donaldson (Eds.), Discourse and
Communication, (pp. 46-73). Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press.
Downing, J. (1990). Ethnic minority radio in the United
States. Howard Journal of Communication, 2(2), 135-48.
Drinnon, R. (1980) Facing west: The metaphysics of
Indian-hating and empire-building. New York: New
American Library.
Dyer, R. (1988) White. Screen, 29.4, 44-64.
Egan, S., & Storey, A. (1992). European asylum policy: A
fortress under construction. Trocaire Development
Review, Dublin, pp. 49-65.
Elliott, J.L., & Fleras, A. (1990). Immigration and the
Canadian ethnic mosaic. In P. S. Li (Ed.), Race and
ethnic relations in Canada. Toronto: Oxford
University Press.
Entman, R. (1990). Modern racism and the images of blacks
in local television news. Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, 7(4), 332-46.
Entman, R. (1992). Blacks and the news: television, modern
racism and cultural change. Journalism Quarterly
69(2), 341-62.
Enzensberger H.-M. (1974). Constituents of a theory of the
media. In Enzensberger, H.-M., The Consciousness
Industry (pp. 95-128). New York: Seabury Press.
Essed, P. (1991). Understanding everyday racism. London:
Sage.
Fernhout, R. (1993, July). Europe 1993 and its refugees.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16(3), 492-507.
Ford, G. (1990). Ford report: Report drawn up on behalf of
the Committee of Enquiry in Racism and Xenophobia.
A3-195/90 European Parliament.
Fox, D.T. (1993). Honouring the treaty: Indigenous
television in Aotearoa. In Tony Dowmunt (Ed.),
Channels of resistance: Global television and local
empowerment (pp. 126-137). London: British Film
Institute.
Gallagher, D. (1989). The evolution of the international
refugee system. International Migration Review, 23(3),
579-587.
Gellner, E. (1992). Nationalism in the vacuum. In A. J.
Motyl (Ed.), Thinking theoretically about Soviet
nationalities: History and comparison in the study of
the USSR (pp. 243-54). New York: Columbia University
Press.
Genovese, E.D. (1969). The world the slaveholders made.
London: Allen Lane.
Gilroy, P. (1987). There ain't no black in the Union Jack.
London: Hutchinson.
Gilroy, R. (1993). Small acts. London: Serpents Tail.
Gooskens, I. (1992). Experimenting with minority television
in Amsterdam. In N. Jankowski, O. Prehn, and J.
Stappers. (Eds.), The people's voice: Local
television and radio in Europe (pp. 225-234). London:
John Libbey.
Gordon, P., & Rosenberg, D. (1989). Daily racism: The
press and black people in Britain. London: The
Runnymede Trust.
Gray, H. (1989). Television, black Americans and the
American dream. Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, 6.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., &
Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis. London:
Macmillan.
Hanchard, M.G. (1994a). Orpheus and power: The movimento
Negro of Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil,
1945-1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hanchard, M. G. (1994b) Black Cinderella? Race and the
public sphere in Brazil. Public Culture, 15, 165-185.
Harris, G. (1990). The dark side of Europe: The extreme
right today. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hartmann, P., & Husband, C. (1974). Racism and the mass
media. London: Davis-Poynter.
Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (1983). The invention of
tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hujanen, T. (1984). The role of information in the
realization of the human rights of migrant workers.
Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of
Journalism and Mass Communication, Series B.
Hujanen, T. (1986). The role of information in the
realization of the human rights of migrant workers.
Progress Report of Joint Study. Department of
Journalism and Mass Communication, University of
Tampere.
Hujanen, T. (1988). The role of information in the
realization of the human rights of migrant workers.
Conclusions and Recommendations. Department of
Journalism and Mass Communication, University of
Tampere.
Hujanen, T. (1989). Information, communication and the
human rights of migrants. Lausanne: Bureau Lausanna's
Pour Les Immigres.
Human Rights Manual (1993). The Department of Foreign
Affairs and Trade 1993, Canberra: Australian
Government Publishing Service.
Husband, C. (1982). Race, identity and British society.
Milton Keynes, UK: Open University E354, Block 2,
Units 5-6.
Husband, C., & Chouhan, J. (1985). Local radio in the
communications environment of ethnic minorities in
Britain. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse and
Communication (pp. 270-294). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Husband, C. (1988). Racist Humour and Racist Ideology in
British Television, or I Laughed Till You Cried. In C.
Powell and G.E.C. Paton (Eds.), Humour in society.
London: Macmillan.
Husband, C. (1989). The Media and refugees: Communication
and human rights in the refugees' world. In T. Hujanen
(Ed.), Information, communication and the human rights
of migrants (153-189). Lausanne: Bureau Lausannois
Pour Les Immigres.
Husband, C. (1993). 'Europe', media and identities: The
European Community and Ethnic Minorities. Media
Development, XL, No. 4, 17-20.
Husband, C. (1994a). 'Race' and nation: The British
experience. Perth, W.A.: Paradigm Press.
Husband, C. (1994b). A richer vision: The development of
ethnic minority media in western democracies. London:
UNESCO/John Libbey.
Hussein, A. (1994). Market forces and the marginalisation
of black film and video production. In Husband, C.
(Ed.), A richer vision (pp. 127-142). London: John
Libbey/UNESCO.
Jakubowicz, A., Goodall, H., Martin, J., Mitchell, T.,
Randall, L., & Seneviratne, K. (1994). Racism,
ethnicity and the media. St Leonard's, Australia:
Allen and Unwin.
Jayasuriya, I. (1988). The Australian-Asian connection:
Retrospect and prospect. Sydney: H.V. Evatt Research
Centre.
Jennings, K. (1993). Sites of difference the moving image
No. 1, Australian Film Institute.
Jhally, S., & Lewis, J. (1992). Enlightened racism.
Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Joly, D. (1992). Refugees: Asylum in Europe. London:
Minority Rights Group.
Jordan, W.D. (1968). White over black: American attitudes
toward the Negro 1550-1812. London: Penguin Books.
Kiernan, V.G. (1969). The lords of human kind: European
attitudes to the outside world in the imperial age.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Langton, M. (1993). 'Well, I heard it on the radio and I
saw it on the Television'. Sydney: Australian Film
Commission.
Li, P.S. (1990). Race and ethnic relations in Canada.
Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Limon, J. (1992). Stereotyping and Chicano resistance: An
historical dimension. In Chon Noriega (Ed.), Chicanos
and film: Representation and Resistance (pp.3-17).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lippmann, L. (1981). Generations of resistance. Sydney:
Longru Cheshire.
Memmi, A. (1965). The colonizer and the colonized. New
York: Orion Press.
Miles, R. (1993). Europe 1993: The significance of
changing patterns of migration. Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 16(3), July, 459-466.
Murray, N., & Searle, C. (1989). Racism and the press in
Thatcher's Britain. London: Institute of Race
Relations.
Ngui, M. (1994). Behind the rhetoric: Employment practices
in ethnic minority media in Australia. In C. Husband
(Ed.), A richer vision: The development of ethnic
minority Media in western democracies (pp. 58-84).
London: UNESCO/John Libbey.
Nordenstreng, K. (1984). The mass media declaration of
UNESCO. Norwood New Jersey: Ablex.
Noriega, C. A. ed. 1992. Chicanos and film: Representation
and resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Orfali, B. (1990). L'Adhesion au front national: De la
minorite active au mouvement social. Paris: Editions
Kime.
Papademetriou, D.G. (1988). International migration in
North America and Western Europe: Trends and
consequences. In R. Appleyard (Ed.), International
migration today. Paris: UNESCO.
Pettman, J. (1992). Living in the margins. Sydney: Allen
and Unwin.
Pike, F.B. (1992). The United States and Latin America:
Myths and stereotypes of civilization and nature.
Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.
Ramirez-Berg, C. (1990). Stereotyping in films in general
and of the Hispanic in particular. Howard Journal of
Communications, 2(3), 286-300.
Reeves, F. (1983). British racial discourse: A study of
British political discourse about race and race-related
matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Riggins, S. (Ed.) (1992). Ethnic minority media. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Roach, C. (1990). The movement for a new world information
and communication order: A second wave? Media,
Culture and Society, 12(3), 283-307.
Rodriguez, A. (in press). Made in the USA: The production
of the noticiero univision. Journalism Monographs.
Austin: University of Texas at Austin College of
Communication.
Rowse, T. (1993). After Mabo: Interpreting indigenous
traditions, Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
Sale, K. (1990). The conquest of paradise. New York:
Knopf.
Schlesinger, P., Murdock, G., & Elliott, P. (1983).
Televising 'terrorism'. London: Comedia.
Seneviratne, K. (1993). Giving a voice to the voiceless:
Community radio in Australia. Media Asia, 20 (2),
66-74.
Stephenson, M.A., & Ratnapal, S. (1993). Mabo: A judicial
revolution. St. Lucia, Queensland: University
Queensland Press.
Stubbs, P. (1994). Access to the media and the challenge to
cultural racism in France. In C. Husband (Ed.), A
richer vision: The development of ethnic minority
Media in western democracies (pp. 84-105). London:
UNESCO/John Libbey.
Taguieff, P. (Ed.) (1991). Face au racisme. Paris:
Editions La Decouverte.
Tomlinson, J. (1992). Cultural imperialism. London:
Pinter Publishers.
Turner, J.C. (1987). Rediscovering the social group.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Valaskakis, G. (1992). Communication, culture, and
technology: Satellites and northern native
broadcasting in Canada. In S.H. Riggins (Ed.), Ethnic
minority media (pp. 63-81). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications.
van Dijk, T.A. (1988). News analysis. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
van Dijk, T.A. (1988). News analysis: Case studies of
international and national news in the press.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
van Dijk, T.A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism.
Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
van Dijk, T.A. (1991). Racism and the press. London:
Routlege
Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the language of
racism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Widgren, J. (1989). Asylum seekers in Europe in the context
of north-south movements. International Migration
Review, 23(3), 599-605.
Winston, M.R. (1982). Racial consciousness and the
evolution of mass communication in the United States.
Daedalus, 111(4), 171-82.
Wodak, R., & Matouschek, B. (1993). Critical discourse
analysis and the study of neo-racism in contemporary
Austria. Discourse and Society, 4(2) 225-248.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Author Information: John Downing
Department of Radio-TV-Film
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1091
jdowning@mail.utexas.edu
Charles Husband
Department of Social and
Economic Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford
West Yorkshire BD7 1DP
England
Telephone: (44-274) 733-466
Fax: (44-274) 385-295
------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1995
Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, Inc.
This file may not be publicly distributed or reproduced
without written permission of the Communication Institute
for Online Scholarship, P.O. Box 57, Rotterdam Jct., NY
12150 USA (phone: 518-887-2443).
 CIOS Support Staffsupport@cios.org
Branch to CIOS home page
|
