Media and Minorities

28
Augie Fleras
the media picture as normal or unexceptional whereas visible minorities find
themselves racialized and excluded by discursive frames that prejudge without
the prejudice.
Whitewashing Mainstream Media as White Ethnic Media
All mass media content could be analyzed from the experience of what is revealed
about ethnicity. The New York Times, for example, could be read as an ethnic newspaper
although it is not explicitly or consciously so.37
A truism in communication studies is the tacitly assumed distinction between
mainstream newsmedia and ethnic newsmedia. Mainstream media
consist of those private (commercial) or public-service outlets that cater to the
widest affluent audience. They are relatively large scale in operation; reach,
i. e., they produce content for a generalized other; position themselves near
the middle in terms of bias and use a mainstream language as a medium of
communication. By contrast, ethnic media are thought to target specific ethnic
minorities by providing information that is community based and culturally
sensitive as well as responsive to and situationally located within a
trans national field of information.38 Ethnic media are thought to differ from
mainstream media because of content that is about, and produced, distributed
and consumed by migrants, minorities and peoples in a language or cultural
idiom that resonates with their experiences and interests. Yet this divide
is problematic. How, for example, ought one categorize global media giants
such as Al Jazeera with its 50 million viewers worldwide: ethnic or mainstream?
Where exactly do mainstream media end and ethnic media begin,
given that ethnic media are becoming more mainstream in their operations,
whereas mainstream media are tapping into ethnic media niches to engage
with new audiences?
Both ethnic and mainstream newsmedia share commonalities at one level.
They both include process (involving the targeting of a preferred demographic),
imperatives (relying on advertising and subscriptions for survival),
37 Stephen Riggins, ed., Ethnic Minority Media. An International Perspective (Newbury
Park: Sage, 1992), 2.
38 Karim H. Karim, The Media of Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2003); Georgiou, “Media
Representations of Diversity”; Murray, Not Another Solitude; Matthew D. Matsaganis,
Vikki S. Katz, and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Understanding Ethnic Media. Producers, Consumers,
and Societies (California: Sage, 2010); Larrazet and Rigoni, “Media and Diversity”;
Clare Johansson and Simone Battiston, “Ethnic Print Media in Australia,” Media
History 20, no. 4 (2014): 416–430.
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882