Downing: MEDIA FLOWS, ETHNICITY, RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA John D.H. Down... MIT_Checkin_date: Tue Jan 2 16:47:51 1996 Filename: downing.v5 ----------------------------------------- ***** 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. 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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).