Minoritetsmedier och minoritetsmediepolitik i Sverige - Myndigheten ...

Concluding remarks
The four landscapes of minority media in Sweden (printed media, radio, TV and
electronic news pages) are vital and constantly changing. Much of the media production
is carried out by people working on a voluntary basis. The public service
organizations the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and the Swedish Television
Company also constitute important actors in the radio and TV landscapes.
There is no coherent, articulated minority media policy, and the processes for
creating one have thus far been slow and lacking in an overall approach. Existing
government forms of support are unequally distributed across the different types
of media. For printed media there are press subsidies and grants for cultural
periodicals, but no corresponding support is available to the other types of media.
The mapping has shown that different minority groups tend to prioritize production
of different media: Swedish Finns are, e.g., strongly represented among the
printed media, the Persian- and Spanish-speaking are strongly represented in community
radio, and programmes in Tigrinya are relatively frequently occurring in
local TV media in relation to the size of this minority group. This indicates the
need for minority media policies that can articulate forms of support for the
different media types, such that no minority group is left outside the grant system.
According to the above line of reasoning, the newly appointed parliamentary committee,
charged with reviewing state support to the daily press and the need for
press subsidies to daily newspapers directed at immigrants and national minorities,
constitutes a step in the wrong direction from the perspective of minority media.
This is because the committee’s conclusions, given its directives, may be expected
to contribute to maintenance of fragmentation in minority media policy and to
continued separate treatment of each type of media.
The new integration policies link together, in a too one-sided fashion, ”integration”
with measures for newly arriving groups, and the grant system that took
effect in 2001 has had negative consequences for some minority organizations, one
of which is reduced organizational support. In this way, these associations receive
decreased funding for media production. Integration is a constantly ongoing process,
and even groups considered to be integrated need support and resources to
continue being integrated. Reading a newspaper in one’s native language – a
newspaper published thanks to funding from the National Integration Office –
can be just as enriching for one person’s life quality as seeing a performance at the
Royal Opera is for another person – a performance that is also subsidized by
the state. It is a good idea that the new integration policy be a policy for all and
that integration be made the responsibility of all governmental authorities and
all individuals, but we must not forget another principle established by the same
policies, namely that general policies must be changed to better take into account
the different types of needs of all societal groups. Until this is accomplished, it is
perhaps too early to begin snatching existing forms of support away.
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