Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Reasearch position paper 6watching American-style channels such as MTV, TNT and CNN and Americanimports (Hargreaves and Mahdjoub, 1997: 474; Sreberny, 1999: 21);viii. across these studies, a gendered pattern of viewing is discernible with womenseeking out soaps, serials and gameshows, and men more attuned to news andsport. The biggest generational difference involves young people’s strongorientation toward music and film;ix. availability and viewing of television from “home” countries does seem toincrease viewer’s interest in the home country, but not at the expense of alienationfrom the new host environment. Evidence about religiosity, for example,suggests that among Maghrebi families in France, the first generationactively practised their Muslim faith, while the children describe themselvesas Muslim but few actively practise and a few said they felt no religious affiliation(ibid.: 463);x. in almost all families there was a mixture of viewing, including new hostcountry channels, American channels and other transnational channels. “Few,if any, participants were completely monocultural in their programmechoices” (Hargeaves, forthcoming);xi. what might be termed “multicultural programming” is welcomed when available.Babel and Couleur Locale on Belgian BRTN (both discontinued), andPassport, on a Dutch channel, were popular, Moroccan women watchingPassport for its use of spoken Berber (D’Haenens and Saeys, 1996: 176-177). Café 21, a youth-oriented discussion programme on BBC2 was verypopular in the United Kingdom (Sreberny, 1999: 34);xii. Belgian immigrants felt that such multicultural programming did help tobuild more positive images about them, enhanced dialogue with native populations,and that increased numbers of non-natives appearing on the screenwould encourage non-native viewing. Young respondents from Britain’s ethnicminorities favoured more mixed programming across all channels, notseparate channels for different ethnicities.LanguageAcross all these studies, language knowledge plays a major role in determiningchannel preferences. But language is a bigger and longer standing cultural issuealso, with the presupposition that media channels in specific languages help themaintenance of that linguistically based identity.Yet an interesting study by Cormack (1993), which focused on Gaelic media inBritain, suggests a more complicated story. Less than 2% of the Scottish populationspeak Gaelic, yet it is making a comeback with educational projects, and theWestern Isles recognised as a bilingual area. But in the early 1990s there were verylimited amounts of Gaelic television, mainly music and children’s programming,and despite the increased political autonomy of Scotland and growing awarenessof Scottish cultural heritage, Cormack notes that Gaelic has survived as a livinglanguage despite a meagre diet of native language broadcasting, and that the161