Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Reasearch position paper 6while a few studies focus mainly on the production side of minority media. Thereappears to be no central information point within Europe where up-to-date data onminority media is maintained. This report tries to stay close to audience practices,although the lack of attention to minority media production is raised in the conclusionof this paper.A fourth, but methodological, point, is that this paper is a review of available literaturecollected within a rather short space of time. As a highly generalisedassessment, there is a burgeoning interest in diasporic media and transnationalcommunities 1 but a comparative dearth of empirically based studies.What exists is very fragmented. Across the seven countries included in the project,there is unequal attention to these issues, with a considerable amount of policy-orienteddebate about multiculturalism in Canada and the United Kingdom, in comparison,say, to the historically strong assimilationist orientation of the Frenchstate. Some of the key issues are not so new, and in many countries, such as theUnited Kingdom, there exists a considerable historical trajectory of research onethnic minority media and ethnic minority audiences 2 on which current work canbuild. There is a particularly strong contemporary research focus on Turks andNorth Africans, then on Asians, as key migrant groups in Europe. Other academicwork has a similar set of concerns but examines countries beyond the purview ofthis report (Husband, 1994; Jakubowicz, 1995). Other work focuses mainly ontraining issues for ethnic minorities, again somewhat beyond the scope of thiswork (Ouaj, 1999; Aitchison, 1999).This report makes no claim to have scoped all the work on the subject. I did try tolocate known researchers in this field to solicit their work as well as further namesof colleagues elsewhere conducting relevant research, and would like to thank allthose academics that responded to my request. Academic and media-related siteson the Internet were not particularly fruitful resources.The current contextIt goes without saying, but needs to be said, that the media environment of Europehas changed radically over the past decade. This is due primarily to the rapidlychangingtechnologies of media diffusion, shifting from solely terrestrially-basedinfrastructures to satellite delivery; from comparative channel scarcity to the multiplicityoffered by fibre optics and broad-band; and from analogue to digital signals.The processes of digitalisation, policy liberalisation and convergence ofbroadcasting and telecommunications are still being worked out in different waysin different European countries, as well as institutionalised within EuropeanUnion policy. Beyond Europe, these processes have also helped to transform themedia landscapes of Asia and the Middle East where significant media productionis taking place.__________1. See, for example, Dayan, 1998; Karim, 1998; Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000; Silverstone, 2000.2. For example, Cottle, 1997, and Gillespie, 1994.157