Media and Minorities

Augie Fleras
Theorizing Minority Misrepresentations
Reframing Mainstream Newsmedia as if
White Ethnic Media
Introduction: Contesting the Representational Frames
Mainstream newsmedia have long been accused of doing a disservice to
migrants, peoples and minorities.1 Representations2 of aboriginal peoples, racialized
minorities, immigrants and asylum seekers are known to underrepresent
in areas that count (“success”) but overrepresent in areas that don’t count
(“failure”), with a range of misrepresentations (“flaws”) in between.3 Pressure
to improve coverage notwithstanding, representations of migrants, minorities
and peoples continue to negatively frame them4 as (a) invisible, (b) problem
1 Rainer Geissler and Horst Pöttker, Media Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Germany
(Bielefeld: transcript, 2005); Elfriede Fursich, Media and the Representation of Others
(Malden, MA: UNESCO/Blackwell Publishing, 2010); Christine Larrazet and Isabelle
Rigoni, “Media and Diversity: A Century-Long Perspective on an Enlarged and Internationalized
Field of Research,” InMedia 5 (October 2014), http://inmedia.revues.
org/747.
2 For our purposes, representations can be defined as mediated images of particular groups
of people from an ideological perspective. Representations (including visual images and
verbal texts and narratives) do not reflect (or represent) reality per se; to the contrary, they
re-present versions of reality that are cloaked in the language of normalcy in order to impart
the gloss of the natural and universal. Stuart Hall, “Racist Ideologies and the Media,”
in Media Studies. A Reader, eds. Sue Thornham and Paul Marris (New York: University
Press, 1997), 271–282.
3 Augie Fleras, The Media Gaze. The Representations of Diversity in Canada (Vancouver:
UBC Press, 2011); Journalists for Human Rights, ‘Buried Voices’: Media Coverage of
Aboriginal Issues in Ontario, Media Monitoring Report, 2010–2013 (August 2013). http://
www.jhr.ca/en/aboutjhr/downloads/publications/buried_voices.pdf.
4 Framing can be defined as a process of organizing information into packages (‘frames’)
that draw attention to some aspects of reality as desirable and acceptable and other aspects
as undesirable or irrelevant in the hope of encouraging a preferred reading of an issue,
event or person, i. e., one consistent with the interests of those doing the framing. Fleras,
Media Gaze; Robert Entman, “Framing. Toward a Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,”
Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (December 1993): 51–58; Robert Entman, “Framing
Bias: Media in the Distortion of Power,” Journal of Communication 57, no. 1 (March 2007):
163–173, DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00336.x.
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882