Abstract
The global significance and importance of media communications in the everyday lives of those groups who have been marginalized, excluded, segregated and enslaved cannot be underestimated. The documentation and illustration of the struggles that have taken place in the establishment of such media are important to acknowledge, for example in the USA the development of the African American press began 40 years before slavery was officially abolished and only a year before Native Americans began publishing newspapers in 1828, which was later followed by the establishment of the first Chinese American newspaper, the Golden Hills News. These papers provided the news and information these communities wanted to read including stories about the exploitative treatment of Chinese miners, the expulsionist removal of tribes, lynching and discrimination together with critiques of the racialization of the American state. The variety of roles these media play is well documented here including the provision of space for excluded voices, maintaining languages and connecting trans-national and trans-regional communities. The difficulties and dilemmas of establishing these types of media organizations, including surviving competition and achieving sustainability, are also examined in depth across four chapters, together with a contemporary account of policy contexts and models of specific media policies including integrationist (e.g. Australia), divisive (French colonial Algeria), pre-emptive (France 1970–2000) and shallow multiculturalism (many regimes including Canada and the UK).
The connections between these media organizations and securing change in local contexts are carefully examined here through exploring the dilemmas and tensions involved in building civic engagement, mobilizing residents and acting as ‘community’ advocates. The chapter exploring these issues focuses particularly on Latino American experiences and perceptions in Los Angeles, and this provides new evidence in the context of this excellent case study which follows through the chain of impact of media organizations through to real-world benefits in terms of health and well-being. This wider set of debates and dilemmas is then used to focus more closely on micro professional issues exploring how journalists, editors and producers face a complex set of challenges in relation to questions of advocacy, objectivity, professionalism, elitism and the promotion of public understanding.
But, for too long, sloppy and damaging use of the concept of ethnicity has been prevalent in academic scholarship and in teaching and unfortunately this textbook is a case in point. Despite the claim that the title of this book makes, this text is not about ‘ethnic’ media, which means ‘our’ media. It only examines media by and for immigrants, minorities and indigenous peoples and mistakenly uses ethnic to refer to ‘them’. Ethnicity refers to the differentiation of groups of people, who have shared cultural meanings, memories and descent, produced through social interaction. In classical Greek the terms ethnos/ethnikos were used in a number of ways to refer to a collectivity who share similar cultural or biological characteristics, for example a tribe of people or a band of friends, and who were not Greek, outside the nation, foreign, different and also inferior, barbarian and less civilized. This distinction between ethnically marked ‘others’ and non-ethnically marked ‘us’ persists unfortunately in the presentation of this text as well as in many other contexts such as in the consumption of ‘ethnic’ fashion or food. Breaking the classical linkage between ethnicity and ‘other’ is a fundamentally important step in theorization and understanding through asserting that we are all ethnically located in that our subjectivity and identity are contextualized by history, language, descent and culture. Therefore, this text cannot be recommended for student use especially as it sets out to lay the foundations for ‘ethnic media’ studies as a field of learning and teaching, which is unfortunate given the excellent range of writing and material that this book contains. The bold and confident misuse of ‘ethnic’ in framing this field propagates misunderstanding and contributes to poor professional practice in journalism. There is much useful material here but this text should not have been published without substantial re-writing to address this fundamental flaw which runs through every chapter, as ‘ethnic media’ is used as a focus for discussion across this material examining historical developments, patterns of consumption, audiences, processes of production and professional challenges.
The implications of this position become clear in the distinction that the authors make between ‘ethnic media’ and ‘mainstream media’ (p. 10). Here they defer to Alba and Nee’s definition of the mainstream as the section of society where ‘racial origins’ have minimal impact. Yet, this seems to deny the ways in which whiteness confers huge privileges, opportunities and benefits for many ‘mainstream’ groups due to processes of racialization across the planet. Indeed the lack of attention to whiteness studies throughout this volume does appear to underlie some of the problems seen here in terms of overall theorization and conceptualization. Moreover, ‘larger society’ is constructed here as unmarked, un-named, without ethnicity and immune to racial identification. The last chapter presents comments from leading academics on the future of ‘ethnic media’. Some refuse to use this term, such as John Downing, but many do not, which indicates a much more widespread problem in the construction of contemporary debates.
In many other ways this is an excellent example of textbook production. It is very student-friendly with a clear focus on learning outcomes, boxed use of text to highlight key points, a rich depth of examples and illustrations, clear chapter summaries and well-formulated study questions. It could also have given greater guidance in the use of electronic resources and further reading.
The use of a wide variety of national contexts adds to the depth of evidence used here. Historical developments are examined in Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia and contemporary policy contexts are examined again in all these cases, with the exception of Mexico. However, this is by no means a global account, in terms of population eight out of the 10 largest countries in the world would not be considered here: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia and Japan. In terms of the top 10 principal agglomerations of people in the world, six would not figure in these analyses including Tokyo (Japan), Seoul (South Korea), Manila (Philippines), Mumbai and Delhi (India) and Shanghai (China). Much still remains to be done to provide a comprehensive account of media by and for minorities, migrants and indigenous peoples across the world. This book does, despite its flaws, help to provide a useful overview of trends and developments and it does acknowledge that a key agenda for future research needs to be the analysis of these media in many other regions of the world.
The rapidly changing landscape of global media communications provides a focus for the last chapter of this book with a useful forward-looking assessment of, for example, the opportunities and risks for these media organizations posed by new technologies. It might also have been useful to consider in more depth when exactly these organizations have broken out of the so-called ‘ethnic media’ category and what criteria may be used to measure this change. In many contexts they have been and will be operating as the ‘mainstream’, rendering this distinction redundant. Rapidly changing, reformulated media analysis is required to keep pace with rapidly changing times.