Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2015

This special issue on ‘Media in minority contexts’ includes some of the best papers presented at a 2012 conference on the same theme held at the University of Alberta. The issue comprises as well three articles written by media practitioners in response to the researchers’ work. It also provides a general literature review of the field distinguishing two main strands of research: the status of media in minority contexts, and the participation of minorities in national, transnational and international debates. This second strand can itself be divided into three different subfields: cultural representations, communicative structures and sociocultural conditions for media access and use. The first article is an introduction to the special issue. It underlines how each of the articles in this special issue adds to the two strands and their subfields. It lays out some questions to explore further and argues that the research framework thus outlined ought to be considered from a multidisciplinary perspective.

This article justifies the need for minority-sensitive media, setting them out as a key plank of intercultural dialogue. To advance this argument, the article analyses minority-sensitive media in terms of the increasing recognition of minorities in international human rights discourse, their continuing poor representations in the media and the democratic potential of minority discourse as intercultural dialogue. It then attempts to appropriate minority discourse as communicative praxis, sketching three key normative communicative roles for minority media actors, namely: facilitating cultural interactions, unmasking cultural stereotypes and intolerance, and forging a common cultural-pluralistic narrative.

Although Canada sees itself as a multicultural nation, its mainstream news organizations have historically failed to recruit and retain the sort of staff who mirror the country’s authentic demographic diversity. At a time when legacy media are in economic crisis, this article argues that newsrooms must become more diverse, not to conform with moral suasion or international treaty, but out of enlightened self-interest, as a matter of survival.

The term ‘language diversity’ is subjected to many contradictory and paradoxical discourses. Facing the effects of economic and cultural globalization, the variety of the languages spoken in the world is on the decline, despite a keen awareness it is a precious universal heritage. Besides, many countries, included those signing the international conventions promoted by the ILO (International Labour organization), the UNESCO or the European Union, are reluctant to plan linguistic policies for minorities. On the basis of enquiries and critical survey of legal texts, the comparative survey between Europe and some Latin American countries, shows how national realities are still shaped by the balance of powers inherited from domination and colonialism. Special attention will be paid to media; in this particular field, what linguistic minorities need to exist within the democratic public sphere is the right to communication: such challenge is presently becoming a reality in some Latin American countries like Argentina.

This article proposes a typology of the models of managing local language press in Africa. Two models are identified: the mainstream and the subsidiary. In the mainstream model are local language newspapers that exist as the sole or main products of a media organization. The subsidiary model consists of local language newspapers that exist as subsidiary products of a foreign (but dominant) language media organization. The two models are differentiated by two major factors: Focus/Attention/Priority and Resources (Sharing) and Men, Materials, Machine and Marketing. Using critical political economy as a theoretical framework, the article draws examples from local language press establishments in Africa to discuss these models. Irrespective of the model of management adopted, the survival of local language newspapers in Africa remains precarious. The survival or otherwise of local language newspapers in Africa is better understood through the prism of critical political economy, a branch of political economy that appreciates the interrelationships between the distribution of material and symbolic resources. The two models of management are affected by political economy, either at the macro or micro level. The power relations among the contesting languages in a society determine to a great extent the economic well-being of any newspaper. The literature on critical political economy addresses the close relationship between those who wield political (and economic) power. This, more than any specific management model, determines the success of any local language newspaper. Even though the general situation with local language press in Africa is not impressive, there are some success stories that can be situated within either of the two management models.

Was cultural and linguistic isolationism in Belgian media unavoidable? What were the legislator’s intentions when it defined the national audio-visual framework? How did those intentions translate into real action? Looking back over the major legislative, technical and strategic choices made in the past few decades, this article shows that the legislator was driven by the will to take advantage of new technologies (to better serve cultural communities). However, this resulted in increased isolationism instead of providing the audience with more freedom of choice.

Aboriginal media offers a viable alternative to Aboriginal gang life largely because Native media employs the same principles for communication that inform Aboriginal gang practice. Rather than individual advancement, both aspire to bring people together in physical space. The history of constraints placed on Aboriginal peoples’ capacities to assemble in public is part of what informs the collectivizing goals of Aboriginal gangs and of Aboriginal communications agencies more generally. Both provide critically important contact zones, where diverse interest groups gather to negotiate, to perform and to exchange ideas about contemporary Aboriginality and Aboriginal youth experience. Media spaces, however, unlike gang turf, create pro-social discursive space for the discussion and contemplation of Aboriginal ways of engaging in the world. The Aboriginal films that circulate through the film festival circuit, for example, address themes that are sometimes difficult to discuss, such as bullying, solvent abuse and suicide.

Kathleen Buddle’s contribution ‘Consolidating codes: “Technosociability” and Winnipeg’s NDN youth networks’ to this special issue on minority media pursues a different and special track as it deals with the impact of the media on minorities, in this case Canada’s First Nations, and how Photovoice/film-making projects empowered marginalized youth in Manitoba. In addition, it addresses the mission of the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies as it attempts to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Vivian Giang comments on Buddle’s article and sheds more light on the role of alternative media not only in preserving minority identity, but also in contributing to national mainstream media.

In Belgium, the political and linguistic divisions make problematic the assertion of a national or regional identity. The political evolution entailed a quadruple division of the media: linguistics; public channels versus private; local channels versus national; and national versus foreign countries. In this context, Flanders became a foreign ground for the French speakers, and the opposite is also true. When a subject is treated, it is as if it was about foreign policy, with simplifications, by resorting to stereotypes.

Taken in these intercommunity cleavages, the Belgian media reveal more of the identity crisis of a country near the separatism than they build a strong identity. The media work as relays of their respective public opinions. That raises the question of the role of media belonging to different linguistic areas but living in the same political entity, and their difficulty to find a balance between defense of the interests of their community and relation distanced from the national stakes.

This chapter is a discourse analysis of news stories about mining in northern Ontario, which were published in the Indigenous newspaper Wawatay News. It examines the claim that the traditional environmental knowledge of the Indigenous populations in North America functions as an ethnic symbol distinguishing First Nations people from other Canadians. It was found that few news stories about mining in 2011 in the territory of the readers of Wawatay News portrayed a modern version of traditional environmental knowledge. Instead, the dominant discourse in most stories was a conservative environmental ethic consistent with Euro-Canadian values. In conclusion, it is argued that the dominant environmental discourse of Wawatay News reflects the weak organizational structure of Indigenous newspapers in Canada.

Scientific research concentrating on Quebec journalism and media has been conducted for nearly 40 years. It may be said that in 2014, the domain is richer and more fertile than ever. Such an emphasis on Quebec, however, gives the impression that there is no francophone journalism worthy of research outside of that province. To compensate somewhat for this shortcoming, I propose two proceedings. First, I will sketch a sociological portrait of journalists in Canadian francophone minorities in order to present a more general overview of this population. Second, I will compare their professional priorities with those of two homologous groups: Quebec journalists, and francophone and anglophone Canadian journalists. This comparison will allow us to observe that journalists in francophone minorities (JFMs) are not so different after all from their counterparts, though they have certain distinguishing traits that I will attempt to explain.

Promoting public understanding is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian- and Rumantsch-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the Idée suisse project, we investigated whether and how SRG, caught between public service demands and market forces, should and actually does fulfil such language policy requirements. Four research modules were combined: module A focused on language policy expectations; B on media management’s interpretation; C on media production and D on media reflection in the newsrooms. Interviews with policy-makers and media managers were triangulated with in-depth analyses of text production processes and workplace conversations. The overall findings: whereas the managers are usually frustrated by the expectations of media policy-makers, a minority of experienced journalists in the newsroom find emergent solutions to overcome the conflict between the public mandate and the market. This tacit knowledge can be identified and made explicit to the entire organization in systemic knowledge transformation.