Broadcasting Diversity

Katie Moylan

Description

Broadcasting Diversity explores modes of migrant representation and participation in Irish radio, focusing on the national public broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann and Dublin community stations and examining the opportunities provided for voicing migrant experience in transcultural program production. Investigating the intersection between an established Irish culture on the one hand and the nascent emergence of a transnational culture on the other, this book focuses on the ways in which migrant representation and self-representation have been variously effected in the Irish public sphere via the medium of radio.

 

Introduction: Exploring ‘Diversity’ in Irish Radio 

Chapter 1: ‘Validating Difference’: Representing Diversity across Broadcasting Policy 

Chapter 2: Representing Diversity on RTÉ Radio: Multiculturalism’s Limitations

Chapter 3: Discourses of Difference and Cultural Relativism: Multiculturalism’s Compromises

Chapter 4: Facilitating Migrant-Produced Programming

Chapter 5: Migrant Production and the Accented Voice 

Conclusion

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Media studies
• General
• Radio

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783202256
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-650-0
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-225-6
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-224-9
Printed by Charlesworth Press, UK
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Exploring ‘Diversity’ in Irish Radio
Chapter 1: ‘Validating Difference’: Representing Diversity across Broadcasting Policy
Chapter 2: Representing Diversity on RTÉ Radio: Multiculturalism’s Limitations
Chapter 3: Discourses of Difference and Cultural Relativism: Multiculturalism’s Compromises
Chapter 4: Facilitating Migrant-Produced Programming
Chapter 5: Migrant Production and the Accented Voice
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Many people generously helped me to produce this book, in multiple and varied ways. First, I want to thank the radio producers and presenters whose contributions were essential to this project: Marcus Connaughton, Olatunyi (T.J.) Idowu, Lizelle Joseph, Aonghus McAnally, Guy Bertrand Nimpa, Melanie Verwoerd and Dil Wickremasinghe. Other radio and media practitioners who provided thoughtful and detailed observations were Sally Galiana, Mick Hanley, Chinedu Onyejelem, Helen Shaw and Zbyszek Zalinski. I am also grateful to John Glendon and everyone in the RTÉ Radio Archive for their help and knowledge. Radio folk really are some of the smartest and nicest people.
I am profoundly grateful to the Irish Research Council (formerly the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences) for funding and thus substantially facilitating this research, and for subsequently offering a postdoctoral award to develop this book, which I regretfully had to decline. I want to thank Brian O’Neill, Alan Grossman, and John Downing for their suggestions and dialectical support throughout the process of researching and writing. Thanks too to friends and colleagues at the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice at the Dublin Institute of Technology for perspective and support: Iroh Anaele Diala, Cliona Barnes, Ann-Marie Murray and Áine O’Brien. Further thanks go to my colleagues at NUI-Maynooth for their collegiality and mentoring, especially Stephanie Rains and Gavan Titley, and to my current colleagues at the University of Leicester for their encouragement in the final stages of this project. Thanks to Tim Mitchell at Intellect, and to Holly Rose and Sarah Moylan for their design advice for the cover.
I want to thank Sarah Hayes, Gerry Kavanagh, Anna Linstrum, Dearbhla McNulty, Nan Swannie Sigsgaard, Mary Wells and Charlotte Wheeler for their friendship and ongoing patience from the inception of this project to its completion. I am additionally grateful to Gerry for his unflagging technical help and expertise. I especially thank my sister, Sarah Moylan, and my parents, Kathleen Adamson and Tom Moylan, for their constant support and understanding. I thank my father in particular for recognizing that I had to find my own way to the work. Finally, I want to express my ongoing gratitude to Jim and Marianne for their patience and love, and for always asking the hard questions.
An earlier version of the research in Chapter 5 appears in ‘Towards Accented Radio: Migrant Produced Programming in Dublin’, in Janey Gordon (ed.), Notions of Community: A Collection of Community Media Debates and Dilemmas . Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009, 109–26.
Introduction
Exploring ‘Diversity’ in Irish Radio
Captured by the radio (the voice is the law) as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long through the forest of narrativities from journalism, advertising, and television, narrativities that still find time, as he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals of sleep.
(Michel de Certeau 1984: 186)
Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed.
(Benedict Anderson 1991: 146)
The Persistence of Whiteness in Irish Media
In autumn 2006, at the height of Ireland’s economic boom, I attended a public debate in Dublin organized to explore opportunities for migrant participation in Irish media. The debate’s title, ‘Is the Irish Media Hideously White?’ referencing a widely circulated contemporary description of the BBC, 1 served as a tacit acknowledgment that the mainstream Irish media remained primarily represented by white Irish voices, even after sizeable inward migration to Ireland. Seven years on, as many ‘new’ migrant communities have subsequently settled in Dublin and elsewhere across Ireland, Irish mainstream broadcast media remains primarily populated by Irish producers as well as Irish presenters, suggesting that despite initiatives such as the debate little has changed. In Ireland, sizeable inward migration is a relatively recent event compared to other western European countries. The 2006 Census reported the number of non-Irish resident in Ireland as 419,733, or just under half one million people; the 2011 Census noted further growth, reporting the number of non-Irish residents as 544,357. 2 As Ireland’s total combined population is just over 4.5 million at time of writing, the number of non-Irish resident in Ireland continues to represent a significant proportion of the country’s population. 3 Yet a polarization of white settled Irish and migrant publics of different races was evident during the 2006 ‘Is the Irish Media Hideously White?’ debate (despite the probable intentions of the organisers). 4 At the event an all white panel included three media practitioners, a union representative, a representative of Irish national broadcaster Radio Telefis Éireann (RTÉ) and a media lecturer, and thus for the most part comprised a combination of elites. 5 The audience for the panel presentation, by my observation, included representatives from several migrant communities and white Irish speakers from grassroots and state funded agencies involved with promoting diversity. Recurring questions during the discussion focused on possibilities for regulation of the Irish media’s representation of diversity, the proposed development of migrant language programming and the expansion of the national broadcaster’s role in facilitating greater migrant representation – all issues that remain open today. However once raised, none of these issues were then comprehensively discussed at the debate, nor were concrete resolutions sought; consequently, by my observation the discussion served to sustain and even reinforce, rather than challenge, a mainstream media practitioner perspective in which most panellists spoke from a position of relative privilege. For the most part, then, this event reinforced a status quo typified by the established and continuing dominance of white Irish practitioners in the Irish media.
In Broadcasting Diversity , I map a moment in Irish broadcasting when sizeable inward migration began to necessitate a more equitable representation of new communities in Ireland. To begin to examine where this representation could be found, I scrutinized Ireland’s media sphere to discover where and how, and to what extent, sustained representation of new migrant communities was heard and facilitated across Irish radio. What is clear when looking back is that the broadcast spaces for migrant representation that existed in mainstream Irish broadcasting have been reduced since 2006. In this book, then, I describe a particular moment during Ireland’s economic boom, when (as of time of writing) the representation of diversity was facilitated to a greater degree than it has been ever since. In this cultural context, I identify and examine then-emergent modes of migrant radio representation in a medium that has retained a centrality in the Irish public sphere as an important form and forum. I locate this examination within a layered exploration of the ways in which these modes of representation exemplify and perform wider tendencies within a multiculturalist project that, I argue, has itself become increasingly limiting and problematic. To situate the thematic parameters of this exploration, I begin by analysing selected cultural policy initiatives and national public service broadcasting content and practice alongside critical readings of discourses of multiculturalism. I then move to a second register in which I explore the role of community radio in facilitating migrant representation, again through analysis of programme content and broadcasting practice, and identify and interrogate the possibilities offered by forms of transcultural (as opposed to multicultural) production. This qualitative exploration draws on a cultural studies approach foregrounding close readings of radio texts, consideration of broadcasting practice determined through practitioner interviews and analysis of emphasized concepts of inclusivity in policy statements. I situate my analysis within those theoretical approaches which most usefully and critically locate identified representational strategies and production practices of selected radio texts within wider contexts informed by multicultural discourses, transcultural practices and ongoing social and political changes to Ireland’s media sphere.
Until sustained sizeable inward migration to Ireland at the start of this century, the country’s relative but long-establ