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Souley Hassane | Mainstream Media vs. Ethnic Minority Media
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television service and groups of blacks. A demonstration on October 9, 2005
protested against what was seen as the perversion of the public broadcasting
service’s obligations. The Internet played a decisive role in the coordination
and the dissemination of information on the subject. In the end, the TV host
and the director of France Television were found guilty of promoting racism,
but notwithstanding, the host retained his position. This, in turn, led to more
demonstrations, which did, in fact, lead to Fogiel’s resignation. With this media
event, blacks made their mark on the French audiovisual landscape, so that, in
contrast to earlier coverage, the opening story now regularly features blacks.
This affair was soon to be eclipsed by the question of slavery, of memory
and of the ‘competition among victims’ in the French media. The question of
slavery became a subject of debate following media reports on Pétré-
Grenouilleau’s book entitled Les traites négrières (Pétré-Grenouilleau 2002). The
author speaks of an “African slave trade”, and the media set the stage for
public debate by giving preeminence to this theory. Afrikara documented the
indignation of the black community. A communiqué by the “Collectif Dom”
(a group of people of Caribbean and African descent) reads as follows (Le
Collectif DOM 2005):
Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau suggests the subject of slavery should have
remained mute, and not been declared a crime against humanity, in
order not to be “compared with the Shoah”. He also suggests that this
law is responsible for further anti-Semitism. Where does this
unjustified indictment come from? In what way can the recognition of
the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity be seen as anti-
Semitic? Should we now renounce the qualification of other crimes
against humanity such as those against the Armenians, the
Yugoslavians or the Rwandans? In intellectual perversity, Pétré-
Grenouilleau considers the suffering of blacks at the hands of slavery
to have been less than the suffering of the Jews of the Holocaust,
rightly recognized for its atrocities. Is it because slaves were
supposedly objects without souls? All the while proclaiming “there is
no Richter scale of suffering”, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau is author of
a strange comparison which gives rise to a competition of
victimization, and continues to unleash hatred between communities.
Afrikara added (Afrikara 2006b):
The slavery question, whether referring to memory or to history,
discharges an irrepressible release and eruption of racial hatred onto
the French audiovisual landscape which is far from having been
expunged of colonial nostalgia and of a particularly profound form of
color phobia: the commemoration of crimes perpetuated against
Media – Migration – Integration
European and North American Perspectives
- Titel
- Media – Migration – Integration
- Untertitel
- European and North American Perspectives
- Autoren
- Rainer Geissler
- Horst Pöttker
- Verlag
- transcript Verlag
- Datum
- 2009
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-8376-1032-1
- Abmessungen
- 15.0 x 22.4 cm
- Seiten
- 250
- Schlagwörter
- Integration, Media, Migration, Europe, North America, Sociology of Media, Sociology
- Kategorie
- Medien