Page - 143 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

143 Augie Fleras Ethnic and Aboriginal Media in Canada: Crossing Borders, Constructing Buffers, Creating Bonds, Building Bridges 1. Introduction: “Taking Aboriginal and Ethnic Media Seriously” Canada constitutes a multicultural society whose ‘multiculturality’ reflects different layers of meaning. Four semantic levels can be discerned, including multiculturalism as demographic fact, as ideology, as government policy and programs, and as practice. Of these multiple meaning levels, references to multiculturalism as official policy prevail (Fleras and Elliott 2007). At the core of Canada’s official multiculturalism is a commitment to institutional inclusiveness. According to the Multiculturalism Act of 1988, all institutions (but especially federal institutions) have a responsibility to proactively engage diversity through initiatives that are reflective of the community they serve, respectful of cultural identities, and responsive to minority needs and concerns (Annual Report 2004/05). Both public and private institutions have taken steps toward improving levels of responsiveness, in part by eliminating the most egregious forms of racial discrimination in service delivery, in part by modifying institutional structures to ensure equitable treatment, in part by creating positive programs to improve access and representation. However well intentioned, a commitment to inclusiveness is not always do-able. So structured are mainstream institutions around racialized discourses of whiteness that minorities are systemically denied access or equity (Henry and Tator 2006). Nowhere is this institutionalized exclusion more evident than in mainstream newsmedia coverage of minority women and men. Despite modest moves toward improving diversity depictions, the newsnorms of a conventional news paradigm continue to frame minorities as troublesome constituents, that is problem people who are problems who have problems and who create problems (Fleras 2004/2006). This framing of diversity around a conflict/problem/negativity nexus is neither intentional nor personal. To the contrary, the unintended yet logical consequences of largely one-sided misrepresentation are systemic in logic: that is, newsmedia coverage of migrants and minorities is systemically biasing than a systematic bias. In that the cumulative effect of such monocultural coverage imposes a controlling effect – after all, what is not said may be more important than what is - newsmedia may well constitute an exercise in systemic propaganda (Fleras 2007).