Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press

The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review, 2011

The Australian ethnic press has historically performed a salient role in the process of integration between immigrants and the host country. Ethnic newspapers can become the voices of the ethnolinguistic community they represent. In a diaspora that is as ethnically diverse as the Spanish speaking community, these periodicals can potentially mediate a community's participation in the public sphere of the country they live in and their country of origin. They have shown to improve awareness of politics and other societal issues from their homeland and host country. The possible impact of internet technology to the Australian ethnic press, in this case the Spanish language press, is an area which has received little academic attention. There have been studies which examined the relationship between the internet and mainstream media, but thus far the ethnic press has been overlooked. In the digital era, the scope for ethnic media is greater than ever, and the cost for developing and sustaining ethnic media has decreased substantially worldwide since the emergence of the internet. This presentation will discuss whether Spanish print newspapers are more effective in increasing the overall number of societal issues than their online media counterparts.

Journal of Sociology, 2016

This article analyses the work of ethnic minority media producers through a series of 13 in-depth interviews with African-Australian broadcasters, writers and producers. Focusing on the aims and motivations of participants, the article demonstrates a more expansive role for African-Australian media, one that brings niche media products into dialogue with mainstream Australian public life and challenges common understandings of ethnic media as appealing to a small, linguistically and culturally defined audience. Such a role also raises questions around wider conceptual understandings of the public sphere, particularly as it is employed to interrogate minority–majority relations. The article concludes by engaging with previous literature focused on the changing contours of the public sphere ideal in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies.

2013

This paper presents interview data from the initial stages of what will become a larger research project on African migrants and the media in Australia. Interviews were conducted with African-Australian media producers, writers, journalists and presenters in Melbourne.

Luigi Pellegrini Editore, 2021

Minorities and Media, 2017

This chapter analyses the work of African-Australian media producers working in the ethnic minority, community and public service media sectors in Australia through the mediums of print, broadcast and the Internet. Based on a thematic analysis of 14 in-depth interviews with black African journalists, writers and broadcasters in Australia, the chapter examines ways in which interviewees discuss and explain their media work, including their motivations, their aims and the role they see their media playing in Australian society. The findings of the study are placed within a historical context of ethnic media production in Australia and internationally in a way that teases out themes of integration, multiculturalism, selfrepresentation and identity politics. The chapter will demonstrate the way in which participants' media work is contextualised by experiences of structural inequality, marginalisation from the communicative environment and a desire to provide self-controlled media narratives and symbols to an African, and wider Australian, audience. Ethnic media occupy a position in the wider media and social environment that belies the relative lack of academic attention they have received. They refuse to sit neatly in a specific media field, occupying positions J. Budarick (*

The Conversation, 2019

An examination of diversity in the Australian media

2017

The impact of media and public discourse, including on new media platforms, is one of the priority themes of the Victorian Social Cohesion and Community Resilience Ministerial Taskforce. The proposed project aligned with the Taskforce’s research priority on “community polarisation and marginalisation”, wherein the project examined the media’s role(both traditional news media and non-traditional/new media such as social mediaplatforms/apps) in disseminating news and information about transnational events and multicultural issues in Victoria. For example, following the November 2015 Paris attacks, the media's coverage of the news event and the Australian community's reaction to the event –irrespective of its positive or negative nature – caused unease among Australian migrants, particularly those following the Muslim faith, as they felt they were put under the spotlight by the media. The primary aim of this project was to investigate the nature, and consumption, of news, infor...

Media, Culture and Society

The potential connections between minority ethnic media producers and the majority ethnic group in multicultural societies have received little academic attention. As a result, important questions regarding the role of ethnic minority media beyond their specialised audiences have remained largely unanswered. In this paper, we draw upon a series of interviews with African-Australian media producers in Melbourne and interrogate the relationship between ethnic minority media and the broader Australian public sphere. Drawing on Husband’s (1994, 1998, 2005) notion of the multi-ethnic public sphere as an ideal-type model, we analyse the explicit and implicit attempts by African-Australian broadcasters and media producers to communicate across communities and to positively impact on the practices and understandings of white Australian journalists and audiences.

Asia Pacific Media Educator, 1997

This article paints a picture of the professional culture of journalists at one regional daily newspaper in Queensland, Australia in relation to their self-described practices in the representation of indigenous Australians. The author suggests that journalists' ideologies and selfdescribed practices tend to conflict. However this conflict tends to be rationalised and justified by thejournalists on the basis of the reality of their practices and adherence to conventional news values.

Media International Australia, Incorporating …, 2003

Since August 2001, Arab and Muslim communities in Sydney’s western suburbs have been caught up in a spiral of signification that linked ‘gang’ activity in the area to the standoff over asylum seekers aboard the MV Tampa, a federal election campaign fought on the theme of ‘border protection’ and global news reporting of September 11 and the ‘war on terror’. Many people who live and work in the Bankstown area responded to this intense news media scrutiny by developing community-based media interventions that aimed to shift the mainstream news agenda. Through media skills training, forums, events and cultural production, Arab and Muslim Australians in the Bankstown area positioned themselves as the subjects rather than the objects of news. This paper analyses news intervention strategies in terms of media power and the politics of representation. I argue that the activities of those working with racialised communities suggest valuable models for the wider process of improving the reporting of cultural differences in multicultural Australia.