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Thriving multicultural media
BC’s ethnic papers should mix it up: study
By Angela Lee
BC’s thriving multicultural media is doing an excellent job helping immigrants adapt to Canadian society, says a new Simon Fraser University study.
However, when it comes to promoting understanding between communities and collective citizenship – two key elements for successful integration and social cohesion, according to researcher Catherine Murray – there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Murray commends the efforts of papers like The Asian Pacific Post to incorporate more diversity in its news coverage to span multiple communities, saying that a trend towards exclusively niche coverage only “limits our capacity to learn.”
“We conducted interviews and quite a few citizens are looking for more shared information – they want [papers] to mix it up,” she says.
“In BC, it looks like our third-language media are doing a good job in covering news here, things that new Canadians need to know in order to settle successfully,” says Murray, a researcher in SFU’s Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities.
The study, titled Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Media in BC, reveals how the ethnic media in Vancouver has devoted a high amount of coverage to home country and local news – but is thin on national news coverage.
With support from the Department of Canadian Heritage, Murray’s team tracked a random subsample of 144 Vancouver-based print and TV news media outlets in 22 languages over a representative month. They found little coverage across the board, for example, of Canada’s war effort in Afghanistan. “That’s one of the most important issues facing this country,” says Murray.
“If there were to be an election, and readers didn’t have a good background on that [issue], how would they form their choices?”
Murray says there is an assumption on the part of ethnic press outlets that readers are also consumers of mainstream media, but “unless this is substantiated in research, how do we know what people know? We seem to have a niche and a division of news labour. “We need to allow the ethnic media to grow [in scope].”
According to Murray, the study also finds that the ethnic media could do more to promote stronger links between various linguistic and cultural groups.
The Air India inquiry, for example, was relatively ignored by the non-South Asian press. Simon Fraser University supports excellence and innovation in academic programs, promotes excellence in research, scholarship and teaching.
Among the study’s other findings:
Ethnic media are better than mainstream media at covering so-called “news you can use”: accessible stories about social and cultural policies, immigration laws and regulations, healthcare and education
There are vast linguistic and racial divides: headlines reflect very different news priorities among the ethnic communities, and Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, or Korean media in particular include little cross-cultural reporting in their news coverage
B.C.’s ethnic media market is large and competitive: nine new newspapers launched during the study period (Sept.-June 2007), and a third of all ethnic media outlets were started since 2000. Korean and Iranian print media are the fastest-growing sector of the industry
Co-ventures on news exchanges between ethnic and English media are increasing
Multicultural reality is either under- or misrepresented in BC’s mainstream media.
Murray says the study recommends independent monitoring of ethnic media news coverage during the next federal and provincial elections in order to know if citizens have access to enough high-quality news to make informed decisions. As well, industry, community and media leaders should develop a code of practice on intercultural reporting; and both federal and provincial governments should improve distribution of translated government information and advertising across ethnic media
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