Rethinking Journalism and Culture

Abstract

Studies of indigenous and ethnic minority news media tend to emphasise their political advocacy role, their role in providing a voice to communities overlooked by mainstream media and, increasingly, the cultural forces at work in these media. By considering ethnic media in terms of how ethnic minority audiences understand what they do with these media, this study provides a different perspective. Focus groups held with Pacific audiences at several urban centres in New Zealand found participants routinely use the idea of journalism in evaluating Pacific media—and journalism for them was a term defined to a significant extent by wider societal expectations around journalism, and not by their ethnic difference. Through examining the intersection of media practices with the ideals and expectations of journalism, this paper questions how far we should foreground the specifics of culture in interpreting people's media use, and advocates a commitment to more empirical research to reorient the study of ethnic media away from a fixation on difference and towards people's media practices.

KEYWORDS:

• culture
• ethnic media
• journalism
• media practices
• Pacific audiences

Notes

1. In a 2011 survey of Pacific peoples’ views on Pacific broadcasting (NZ on Air 2012b) more than 70 per cent of respondents said they watched Māori TV for “Pacific programmes”, making Māori TV their second-most-watched television channel.

2. This tension is mirrored elsewhere, for example at the indigenous Māori Television Service. Launched in 2004 with the explicit aim of contributing to language revitalisation, it created a second te reo channel in 2008 for fluent Mäori language speakers and second-language learners in a bid to manage the competing tasks of programming for language revitalisation and programming to build and maintain audience share (Māori Television Service 2008).

3. Typically, ethnic media outlets lack enough trained staff and/or are too poorly resourced to undertake much of their own reporting and news is often pulled second-hand from elsewhere (Browne 2005; Kailahi 2009; Utanga 2007).

4. Interviews with producers: Samoa Capital Radio, 18 September 2010; Pacific Beat Street, 30 September 2010; Niu FM, 24 August 2011.

5. The capacity of Pacific media to produce high-quality journalism was brought into sharp relief by TVNZ's decision in late 2014 to outsource its Pacific programmes. At the time, Radio New Zealand noted in a 13 December 2014 report that New Zealand had only one small Pacific production company and Spasifik reported (November 2014) that Pacific communities questioned the capacity of small independent companies to produce the shows to the same quality with the same budget.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.