Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Reasearch position paper 1presence of immigrants, as much research testifies. 1 Research suggests that overtime, a once “problematic” immigrant group gradually loses its negative stereotypein the media, only to be replaced by some new “outgroup” – currently often“asylum seekers” (Lubbers, Scheeper and Wester, 1998).In several countries, there are examples of immigrant groups receiving their ownlocal cable television services, especially in larger cities (for example MigrantenTV in Amsterdam). Where the ethnic immigrant population reaches a “criticalmass”, the situation is even more favourable. Husband (1998) has concluded withreference to the United Kingdom that “on the whole, minority ethnic communitiesare well served by the press”. He reports a case study of the Pakistani minority ofthe city of Bradford, which accounts for more than 10% of the population. They notonly have several newspapers, but also several radio stations, some local cable televisionand many film and video outlets. The media environment of this particularminority is rich enough to allow considerable fragmentation and internal diversityof its own. Husband even sees a potential problem of a threat to a shared publicsphere which can “facilitate dialogue and engagement across ethnic boundaries”.Media concentration and pluralismAlthough media pluralism and concentration, as indicated above, has been on theagenda of European policy discussions for some years, there is little comparativeresearch. It is hard to reach conclusions about the extent of any problem or theprospects of any solution. 2 Little more has been done at the pan-European levelthan the work of the Council of Europe and the European Commission in inventorisingthe situation of different media systems in respect of concentration andposing certain questions for Europe of the kind that arise in national contexts.Local, community and alternative mediaMedia research has always tended to pay most attention to the “big media” of themoment, especially television, as if size (or ratings) must be correlated with significancein other respects. Against this trend, there has also long been a movementof researchers in Europe to pay attention to “small media”, especially localand community radio and television. 3 The main conclusion of research on localand community media is that the new technologies (and also the climate of deregulation)have opened the way for more diverse access opportunities and morealternative forms of media expression for small groups, something that is stillgrowing with the Internet. 4 Small scale media take their impetus from real communities.Their tendency thus is to reinforce the identity of the minorities and revitaliselocalities they serve, rather than crossing cultural boundaries as such.__________1. For example, Leurdijk, 1997.2. But see, for instance, Pauwels, 1998; Picard, 1998; Meier and Trappel, 1998a and 1998b;Humphreys, 2000.3. See, for example, Jankowski, Prehn and Stappers, 1992; Jankowski and Prehn, 2000.4. In general, globalisation has affected national media (through the spread of global media culture andcommercial links) much more than it has local media that have acquired a new vitality and do not haveto cede audiences.81