Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesThe second major impact on the European media environment is the new incomingmigrant communities and the various attempts to satisfy their information and culturalneeds with new media channels and products. The earliest televisual responsesto immigrants was for public service channels to produce programmes for immigrants,which sometimes meant migrants producing a programme that aired on apublic channel; this evolved into multicultural programming on terrestrial channels.In the 1990s with the advent of cable and satellite broadcasting, new channelswere specifically targeted at different population sectors, including minorities,sometimes produced from within the space of the national migrant group as well asthose satellite channels that broadcast from an originary “homeland” or are an offshootof a non-European broadcaster for a particular diasporic community acrossthe territorial boundaries of Europe. To take the British Asian communities as anexample, the variety of channels to choose from partly depends on residential location;for example, it might include programming aimed at very specific locales,such as that provided for the Asian communities in Leicester by MATV, whichoperates on a Restricted Service Licence. Other channels are oriented toward thedifferent Asian communities in Britain, producing programmes in a number of differentAsian languages: Sunrise 24-hour Asian radio is available mainly in Londonand the south-east of England, with affiliates in Bradford and Leicester; Asianettelevision is only available on cable through fourteen cable franchises in the UnitedKingdom. Then there are the nationally based, trans-European channels such as theIndian-based ZEETV and the recently established (spring 2000) PakistaniTV aswell as the global broadcasters such as Sony Entertainment Television Asia. 1 Thereis also the multicultural programming offered by the public service providers,mainly BBC2 and Channel 4, by which “minority-oriented” programmes like thecurrent affairs series, East, or a cookery programme like Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavoursof India are watched by the wider community. The most successful recent programmethat began as a minority radio programme and became an immensely populargeneral comedy programme on television was the British/Asian-written, -directed and -performed Goodness Gracious Me.This is a very rapidly changing media environment, which is difficult to map for asingle country, or for a single minority group. In a recent paper Robins and Aksoy(2000) usefully map the range of twelve available analogue channels from Turkeyand for Turkish Cypriots in Europe, including state broadcasting channels, religiouschannels and privately owned entertainment channels which are now availablethrough satellite and/or cable in many European countries, particularly – of relevancefor this report – in Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.The data often focuses on a single form of media, like television, and forgets theradio, video, Internet and other cultural provision within which most minoritygroups now live. What would be useful is the kind of data provided by the excellentRomani media map, 2 which shows the presence of a whole range of mediaforms across Europe: Romani radio stations, Romani programmes on mainstream__________1. See Tsagarousianou, 1999.2. Roma Rights, 1999, No. 4 entitled “Romani media/Mainstream media”.158