Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Reasearch position paper 6Once the problems of minority media centred around concerns about socialfragmentation and the collapse of a national public sphere. Increasingly, the newdanger that analysts foresee is that the growth in more particularistic minoritychannels appears to let the public service broadcasters in Europe off the hook ofproviding minority-oriented and multicultural programming. Public channels feelreleased from their duty to serve the whole population, leaving the foreign channelsto provide for minority tastes (Frachon and Vargaftig, 1995: 7). And so “difference”becomes simply a commodity, prey to global commercial pressures.Tsagarousianou’s conclusion about the rise of ethnic media in the United Kingdomduring the 1990s is that “dialogue within and between ethnic communities andother social groups remains at best a distant goal as issues of recognition (as far asethnic communities are concerned) and competitiveness, consolidation and survival(as far as the ethnic media themselves are concerned) seem to occupy centrestage at the moment.” (Tsagarousianou, 1999: 67)The overwhelming desire of young members of Britain’s minority ethnic communitieswas to see much more mixed programming, with more non-white faces ontelevision, and more attempts to articulate the different parts of British society toeach other, more representation of a culturally mixed Britain. As one respondentput it, “unless they try and represent us as a society (…) that’s made up of lots andlots of different parts, and we might all be interested in each other, then it’s notgoing to happen.” (Sreberny, 1999: 73). Channel 4 in Britain has embraced thisnew orientation enthusiastically, with Michael Jackson, its new head, arguing that:“This is a time of extraordinary social and cultural transformation. (…) We livein a less homogeneous, more pick-and-mix culture, and we’re better off for it.(…) Traditional minorities have achieved greater assimilation. They don’twant only specialist programmes that reinforce their separateness within society,but also programmes that bring their attitudes and interests into the centreground of the schedule.” 1Yet the evidence suggests that while multicultural programming produced by publicservice channels does find non-native audiences, their information and culturalneeds are rarely met by this. There is a sense in which such programming worksbetter for the native population, teaching them about and so reconciling them tothe foreigners within their midst, yet does not fully satisfy the needs of the nonnativepopulations. 2 And the generational factor probably operates here: newcomerswanting to keep in touch with old “homes” more than the second and third generationswhose homes are where they live.Our analytic language hypostasises social divisions. The language of “native/nonnative”reproduces a binary divide that doesn’t allow for new and multiple affiliations,new homes, bi- and multilingualism. In recent research in the UnitedKingdom, the language of affiliation of the participants themselves frequently suggestedmore than one point of connection: “Bangladeshi Muslim”, “Indian Sikh”,__________1. Michael Jackson, Four the record, The Guardian, 5 July 1999, quoted in Sreberny, 1999: 90.2. Ibid.163