Page - 226 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Round Table Discussion | Worst Case and Best Practice 226 Augie Fleras I’m not quite sure what you mean by that. Leen d’Haenens I mean, it’s a conditional policy, and that’s why also in Europe conditions are developed now. Look at the Netherlands and the change: it’s more complex now, since five years ago. Before that, there was no entry condition whatsoever. Now there are a few conditions in terms of knowledge of the language. And Canada has had it from the start. I wonder how ready the Canadians are or will be for a news presenter wearing a veil now. From the audience Would you be ready? Augie Fleras Would I be ready? Of course. Again, I wonder how important it is what we see in public, in terms of news casting. I suppose we could open it up for debate. Because these are just the faces of people who are mechanically delivering the news. I’m much more interested in what is the social construction involved in terms of creating the news, regardless of who presents it, which seems to be a much more important issue with respect to how news items are framed, how they are placed within the news cast itself. And, you know, as a sociologist, I think I came to acknowledge some of the structural difficulties in making these kinds of changes. What we have is really a form of systemic bias towards news casting as negativity, which is deemed to be normal. It’s not like a systematic bias, which one can see as an abnormality that can be isolated and removed with the right kind of attitude and action. It’s systematically embedded and it truly does require a transformative change. But I think a woman with a veil on the news cast really would be more of a cosmetic change. I don’t know if somebody has heard of it, because apparently it was no international success, but we have the show “Little Mosque on the Prairie”, a CBC special. The show has attracted enormous attention because it does feature Muslims who are trying to adjust themselves in a small prairie town. And as you can appreciate, the humour arises from the fish-out-of-water context, both for the white residents who are completely baffled by what is going on, as well as the Muslims who have to cope with the idiosyncrasies of that.