The relationship between media and democracy is undergoing a series of rapid transformations. Fragmentation and diversification of both political communities and the media environment have led to a splintered political and social landscape, characterised by more divisive and less civil political discourse. The once broad stage of general democratic consensus is becoming increasingly thinner, as extreme positions stretch it further from the centre. How politics should be conducted, and reported are matters of intense and at times vitriolic debate. With this, journalists face a more complex and less certain political terrain. At the very least, the current climate seems to have well and truly moved beyond any neat relationship between the public and the media (Karppinen, 2013a). For many in the liberal-democratic west, these changes signal a moment of deep concern.
As with all current ācrisesā, there is a tendency to overlook historical precedents. For many critics, the mediaās role in democracy has for a long time included a series of failed promises and unmet ideals (Cunningham, 2000; Curran, 2011; McChesney, 1999). Noble liberal values of a free press, independent of the state and reflective of a genuine plurality of views in an autonomous āmarketplace of ideasā, are, and have been for some time, little more than cover for heavily privatised media systems that prioritise profit and commercial interests over public service journalism (Phelan, 2014b). Media structures are dictated by commercial imperatives and characterised by concentration, inequality and a deficiency in their role as the fourth estate (Cammaerts, 2015; Curran, 2011). The promise of the digital remains unfulfilled, if anything being used to exploit the failure of traditional media and to provide avenues for a litany of extremist and undemocratic perspectives.
The current crisis, however, is said to signal something new. A different relationship between journalism and politics has emerged that is fundamentally damaging to democracy. It is defined by a lack of trust in experts, the rise of fake news, and a deteriorating relationship between political leaders and journalists. It makes itself felt most obviously in populist political movements, wherein ideologies take precedence over facts, and the language of division reigns supreme over the language of unity. Remedies for this malaise often coalesce around a rediscovery of core journalistic values, a re-emphasis of facts over ideologies, of truth over opinion. Journalism must re-emphasise its privileged role in democracy, its position as the fourth estate, as the critical, fact-based defender of the public. Without a broad, commonly shared reality and set of facts and values to draw upon, consensus politics is doomed to fail.
While this response has merit, what it, and other responses to the failures of media democracy have in common is a focus on the most powerful sectors of the media landscapeācorporate and public service media, traditional āmainstreamā journalismāand a preoccupation with well-established models of the mediaās role in democracy. In this book, I also look at the relationship between media and democracy, but do so from a different perspective. I focus on ethnic media, and in doing so insert race, ethnicity and cultural diversity into an analysis of media and democratic theory.
Looking at the relationship between media and democracy from the perspective of ethnic media invites a new engagement with social and political theory, and a new way of imagining and understanding ideal models of media democracy in relation to ethnic diversity. Taking the politics of race and ethnicity seriously means acknowledging the ways that media practices and political systems considered democratic have been constituted through racist exclusions and inequalities. It means questioning some of the dominant understandings of the democratic role of media, and rethinking several of the popular responses to the current crisis in journalism.
Race has largely been ignored in democratic theory. The constitutive role of racial inequality in the development and maintenance of liberal democracy fades from view when modern racism is greeted with shock and dismay in contemporary public and political discourses (Gould, 2000; Khiabany & Williamson, 2015; Mills, 2017). The political ignorance of racism as anything other than individual transgression of normative political values is articulated by Lentin and Titley (2011, p. 49):
Racism persists because there has been no serious effort made to challenge the interconnections between the idea of race and the institutions and structures of the modern nation state. Race has been semantically conquered, but it remains deeply engrained in the political imaginaries, structures and practices of āthe Westā.
As central āinstitutions of the modern nation stateā, media have played a key role in the constitution, definition and structuring of difference (Nolan, Farquharson, & Marjoribanks, 2018). Despite continuing claims of mere ārepresentationā of an objective reality, āmedia and journalism practices are deeply politicalā, and the media of the dominant ethnic group help to construct, legitimise and naturalise powerful political structures, social relationships and cultural practices (Phelan, 2014b, p. 59). As with democratic theory, explanations of racism in the media often locate the cause in a breach of proper journalistic values and practices, rather than as potentially the outcome of those same practices (Downing & Husband, 2005; Lentin & Titley, 2011). Similarly, public and political forms of racism and ethnically based inequality continue to be detached from historical, political and social contexts when reported in media, and are often understood as exceptions to a liberal-democratic system based on individual equality and freedom.
When we consider the media, democracy and ethnicity, then, we need to think about the ways in which different democratic models contemplate race and ethnicity, and the tools they provide for developing a media system perhaps more capable than present of challenging racism and discrimination on a structural level. I argue that to undertake such a task, one needs to consider the relationship of media and democracy from the perspective of those that sit outside its centres of power.
Ethnic media are yet to be analysed in their full relationship to democracy and democratic theory. While they have been considered as providing the spaces for the construction of alternative identities and communities in ways that challenge dominant understandings of ethnicity, race and culture, unlike other forms of media, they have rarely been discussed within the context of the explanatory and normative power of democratic and social theory (Couldry & Dreher, 2007; Husband, 1998). And yet, engaging with ethnic media as the starting point of analysis raises different questions of democratic and social theory than does a concern with their public, commercial and digital counterparts: questions around the avenues of interaction between groups and people with disproportionate levels power based on deeply entrenched biological, socio-cultural and historical forms of knowledge; questions around the nature and role of ethnic and racial identity in politics and society; and questions around the nature of hegemonic forms of media practice that coalesce with dominant understandings of what it is to be a native, a migrant or a ālegitimateā member of the political community.
Ethnic media are also deeply implicated in the politics of difference and questions over the nature of democracy (Young, 1990). For over a century, they have been involved in debates concerning cultural, religious and linguistic identities, political rights, integration and nationalism (Gilson & Zubrzycki, 1967; Matsaganis, Katz, & Ball-Rokeach, 2011). They make visible and give collective shape to people, practices and cultures that areāin different contexts and to different extentsāmarginalised and rendered silent through both formal and informal forms of political belonging (Brubaker, 2010; Colic-Peisker, 2018). They can be both conservative and radical, maintaining inter-group hierarchies and relations while challenging social inequalities in the broader society (Browne, 2005). They are implicated in, and can tell us much about, many of the defining political and social issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, such as migration, multiculturalis...