Ethnic media

The April edition of Policy Options has an interesting piece by SFU communications researcher Catherine Murray, about Canada’s ethnic media. Murray discusses in part, the emergence of “multiple solitudes.”

From the introduction:

Do Canada’s ethnic media serve an integrative role? How can communication policy improve the integration process? Catherine Murray reports on a study of British Columbia’s ethnic media conducted by Simon Fraser University. The results show that ethnic media have little national or provincial news focus and little intercultural reporting, but compared with other media elsewhere they do have healthier “translocal” hybrids of local and international news. She observes that the niche strategy segregating ethnic media, which until recently predominated, is unravelling. In terms of policy, she says attention is urgently needed to induce a stronger self- regulatory culture among ethnic print media and to allow more flexibility for ethnic broadcasters, while preserving the level of media competition.