Media and Minorities

Theorizing Minority Misrepresentations  33
crowding; compromise Canada’s highly touted quality of life; take advantage
of educational opportunities without making a corresponding commitment
to Canada; engage in illegal activities, such as selling drugs and smuggling,
and imperil Canada’s national unity by refusing to conform or participate.61
Their being labelled as “problem people” is compounded by a fixation on illegal
entries via queue jumping and human smuggling rings, anxieties over
security and anger over the cost of processing and settlement.62 Exaggerated
and negative coverage of those who transgress the norms of acceptable behaviour
may not be intended to incite moral panic.63 But, in reinforcing the adage
that what representational hype doesn’t say may prove to be as distorting as
what it does say, it may stampede an already edgy public into supporting policies
and programs that put migrants, minorities and peoples in their ‘proper
place’ in a racialized society.64 Needless to say, any shared sense of humanity
with the ‘stranger within’ is elusive when mediated images are embossed with
the stamp of white paranoia and mainstream nightmares.65
Conclusion: Mediated Images Matter
In this paper, I have made the following abundantly clear. First, mainstream
media tend to exclude migrants/minorities/peoples by virtue of the fact that
they constitute white ethnic media that are pro-white rather than anti-minority
in framing coverage of diversity and difference. Second, a commitment to
more inclusive newsmedia representations of migrants/minorities/peoples
may, ironically, perpetuate an exclusionary discourse when mediated images
of race, ethnicity and aboriginality are coded (that is, “framed”) in the language
of the preferred norm of white Eurocentricity. Newsmedia misrepresentations
of diversity and difference are neither random nor accidental, according
to the logic of a racialized media approach.66 Nor are they something out of the
ordinary, that is, a departure from an otherwise inclusive institutional norm.
Mainstream newsmedia are anything but neutral or value free as systems of
61 Chan, News Media Representations.
62 Alan Simmons, Immigration and Canada: Global and Transnational Perspectives (Toronto:
Canadian Scholars, 2010); Rima Wilkes, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, and Danielle
Ricard, “Nationalism and Media Coverage of Indigenous People’s Collective Action in
Canada,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 34, no. 4 (2010): 41–59.
63 Jiwani, “Racism and the Media.”
64 Hier and Greenberg, “News Discourse”; Augie Fleras, Immigration Canada: Evolving Perspectives
and Emergent Challenges (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014).
65 DeVega, “The ‘Niggerization’ of Michael Brown.”
66 See also Goodyear-Grant, Gendered News
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ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882