Minorities, Media, Marketing and Marginalization

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Global Media and Communication

DOI: 10.1177/17427665093409692009; 5; 177Global Media and Communication

John SinclairMinorities, media, marketing and marginalization

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Minorities, media, marketing andmarginalization

■ John Sinclair

University of Melbourne, Australia

AB ST R A CT

Given that increased rates of population movement across borders in recentdecades have coincided with an era in which audiences for mass media are being

fragmented and ever more precisely targeted according to demographic criteria,

we might expect to find that ethnic minorities have become exposed to intensive

exploitation as consumer markets. We would be wrong. The small size and often

dispersed distribution of many minorities makes it uneconomical for major

advertisers to seek to reach them, whether through their own ‘ethnic’ media at

the local level, or even the international satellite channels which now serve

globally distributed minority audiences. While there may be enviable advantages

to being segregated from commercial influence in this way, it is also a form of

marginalization, a restriction of full cultural citizenship. This article contrasts thecase of Chinese-speaking minorities in Australia with that of Spanish speakers in

the United States.

K E Y W O R D S

advertising ■ Chinese ■ cultural citizenship ■ diasporas ■ Hispanic ■

international satellite television ■ minority marketing ■ multiculturalism

One of the anomalous aspects of the increased movements of peoples

across borders in recent decades is that they are in general ignored by the

large corporate advertisers who dominate the media of the countries of

destination. It might be thought, for instance, that with the ‘settlement

needs’ (Chan, cited in Wilkinson and Cheng, 1999: 110) which new

immigrants have in setting up a household, they would form a target

market for a wide range of goods and services, from electrical appliances

to health insurance. Or that advertising in selected minority languages

would be an effective way to reach longer established, even second

generation migrants who are still most comfortable with their languageof origin, and cannot be easily reached through mainstream media.

Given the advertising and brand-saturated cultural environment of

ARTICLE

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Global Media and Communication [1742-7665(2009)5:2] Volume 5(2): 177–196

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178 Global Media and Communication 5(2)

contemporary capitalism, in conjunction with a trend to ever more

fragmented and hence targetable audiences, why would we not expect

cultural diversity to have become a commercial as well as a civic reality?

From the point of view of most large advertisers, what is beingreferred to here as ‘minority marketing’, that is, the commissioning of

language- and culture-specific advertising campaigns, and the strategic

placing of such material in ‘ethnic’ media to reach the target audience, is

just not worth it. In most destination countries, the largest advertisers

distribute or deliver their goods and services on a national basis, and

advertise accordingly, which is why they are called ‘national advertisers’

even when they are foreign-based corporations with global brands. Thus,

manufacturers – whether of cars or ‘fast moving consumer goods’

(FMCG) – telecommunication service providers, and also national retail

networks who typically dominate the lists of the largest advertisers in

the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia ( Advertising Age,

2007), have an inherent bias in their ‘business model’ towards the

dominant national culture of whichever national society they are

advertising in (Pires and Stanton, 2005: 251).

This is one major reason why, despite the considerable growth in

expenditure on newer advertising media, notably the internet, the lion’s

share of national advertising revenue still goes to national free-to-airtelevision networks, and keeps them at the centre of national culture. The

basic economic rationale of commercial television remains paradigmatic –

the free provision of scheduled information and entertainment content

which attracts audiences whose attention can then be sold to whichever

advertisers want to gain access to them. In the commercial logic of the

industry, it follows that there is no provision of programming on

mainstream television for minorities, even those whose size approaches

‘critical mass’ (Sinclair and Cunningham, 2001: 22). There is the significant

exception of Spanish speakers in the US, who are served by distinct

national networks, but in general, they and even African-Americans are

represented fairly sparsely in programming, and advertising, on

mainstream networks. Morley cites a series of studies in the UK reporting

the frustration of minorities there concerning the infrequency with which

they find themselves addressed or represented on national television

(2000: 20–4). Such commercial disenfranchisement of minorities from

national culture has consequences for the media choices they make

elsewhere, as will be discussed later in the article.Most advertiser resistance to minority marketing has to do with the

uncertainty of the target, and this becomes a causal factor in the

marginalization of minorities. Often there is a perception that minorities,


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John Sinclair Minorities, media, marketing and marginalization 179

particularly recently arrived immigrants and refugees, are just too poor

to bother with, although this is obviously not true of groups such as

those arriving under ‘business immigration’ programmes. With long-

established groups, the perception is that they will have assimilated anddo not require any special targeting. The sheer diversity of the range of

minorities now present in the destination countries is another reason

why advertisers might not want to engage in minority marketing. This is

a variation of the ‘critical mass’ problem, which some marketers have

sought to deal with by the aggregation of minorities seen to have some

factor in common (Pires and Stanton, 2005: 73). As will be explained

later, the creation of the category of ‘Hispanics’ in the US is a major

instance of how language can be used as a basis of commonality amongst

peoples of diverse ethnic or national origins (Dávila, 2001; Sinclair,

2006). Rather more abstract is the aggregated category ‘Asian-Americans’,

or even ‘Asian-Pacifics’ used in the US, for which there is no commonality

beyond region of origin. The hollow reductionism of such a category

risks failure for campaigns directed towards it, and actual instances of

failure then become a further reason why advertisers feel they had better

resist the urgings of advertising agencies and media to engage in minority

marketing. Another reason is fear of the brand becoming associated with

a racial outgroup (Pires and Stanton, 2005: 75). Perhaps the mostdefensible reason is the lack of measurement: certainly in the case of

Australia, there are no audited circulation or audience figures for the

minority media, so advertisers prefer to use the measured, mainstream

media (Chan, 2006; Russell, 2007).

All this said, the resistance or mere indifference which large

advertisers show towards minority marketing should not be exaggerated,

since there are several major corporations that do take it seriously, and

furthermore, the degree to which minority marketing is institutionalized

varies considerably from one country to another, and indeed, from one

minority to another: ‘some ethnic groups are more different than others’

(Pires and Stanton, 2005: 79). For this reason, we should now move on

to consider particular cases.

‘Critical mass’ amongst Chinese speakers in Australia

In spite of the exceptionally wide range of countries from which Australia

has drawn its immigrants since the end of the Second World War, and thesubstantial numbers it has attracted, still the descendants of the late 18th-

and 19th-century Anglo-Celtic settlers remain the numerically dominant

and hegemonic ‘charter group’. Furthermore, even in the 2006 Census,




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the largest overseas-born groups were those born in the UK and New

Zealand: however, China (PRC) had overtaken Italy as the next largest

overseas birthplace after these, signalling a preponderance of relatively

recent arrivals from China over the largest continental European source ofdecades ago (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007a). As to language,

500,466 persons spoke a Chinese language in 2006, making ‘Chinese’

(Cantonese, Mandarin, or other) the next most commonly-spoken

language in the country after English. This is in a country of 20.7 million,

so Chinese speakers amount to about 2.5 per cent of the population

(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007b), though an unknown number of

these are bilingual.

Evidently, if any minority is approaching ‘critical mass’ in Australia,

it is the Chinese. However, it should be borne in mind that there is great

diversity within this group, more than in other destination countries,

reflecting the global Chinese diaspora both in terms of origin and length

of residence. That is, the relatively recent arrivals from the PRC are

joining Chinese communities which have existed in Australia since the

mid-19th century, first formed by Cantonese from South China, and

later, in the 20th century, reinforced by Chinese from Southeast Asia,

especially Malaysia and Singapore in the 1970s and 1980s. As well, there

has been an influx of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, and ‘businessmigrants’ from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The latter form something of a

socioeconomic elite, along with the well-established professional classes

from Southeast Asia (Sinclair et al., 2001: 36–9).

At this point, a note on the policy context of migration to Australia is

in order. Driven by the need to build its population and stimulate

economic development after the Second World War, Australia went from

being a pariah known for its racially discriminatory immigration policy to

a model of multiculturalism within a generation. Multiculturalism as a

concept was a social ideal which aimed to encourage cultural diversity,

but maintain national unity by the rule of a common legal system and

language. It was constituted by a series of institutions established in the

1980s, the most durable of which has been SBS (Special Broadcasting

Service), now a national television and radio network, to which we shall

return shortly. As an extension of multiculturalism, in the mid-1990s, the

federal government adopted ‘productive diversity’ as policy, which sought

to capitalize upon the reality of cultural diversity as an economic asset.

Multiculturalism was about the management of immigrant settlement,and arose as a belated response to the failure of an implicit policy of

assimilation which had begun to occur with the sharp increase in NESB

(non-English-speaking background) migrants. Productive diversity was a




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provide a wide range of imported foreign-language programming, but

affirming English as the national language by subtitling all non-English

programmes. It was funded directly from the federal budget, like its older

and much larger public broadcasting sibling, the ABC (AustralianBroadcasting Corporation). However, SBS television (but not, at that

stage, the multilingual radio service) was permitted to augment its very

modest income by accepting commercial ‘sponsorships’ in 1990, and to

carry full-blown television commercials (TVCs) in 1992. These were

controlled in number, and restricted to being placed only in between

programmes. Once again, along with government agencies, it was service

companies that were the first main advertisers: insurance, airline,

telecommunications companies. The SBS audience was, and remains,

small, but composed not only of the ‘ethnic viewers’ whom its charter

obliges it to serve, but also the more ‘cosmopolitan’ mainstream middle

class, a more attractive audience to advertisers (Shoebridge, 1995; Sinclair

et al., 2001). In its efforts to compete with the other networks, and

especially pay-TV, in 2006 SBS commercialized itself further by running

TVCs within programmes, and scheduling more mainstream, English-

language programmes, thus raising questions about its capacity to

continue to serve NESB audiences and so meet its responsibilities to

multiculturalism (Ricketson, 2007).To return to the particular case of the Chinese in Australia, from the

point of view of minority marketing, it is useful to take stock of the range of

media available to them, and to advertisers. To consider the press first, some

sources claim there are as many as 50 Chinese newspapers in Australia

(Bushell, 2007: 29), and minority marketing advocates like to make the point

that the combined circulation of these newspapers is greater than any

leading daily newspaper in the nation’s largest city, Sydney (Russell, 2007).

However, even if the circulations were verifiable, only a handful of the

Chinese press titles are dailies, so this is a spurious statistical artefact.

Furthermore, the advertising they carry is predominantly local, although, as

noted, impressionistic evidence suggests there has been somewhat more

interest from larger advertisers since the mid-1990s, including Chinese and

other international companies, as well as Australian ones (Liu, 2007; Gao, 2008).

Radio services are predominantly from the public broadcasters ABC and SBS,

with some community services, so there is very little commercialization of

that medium. However, 3CW Radio in Melbourne is an exceptional case in

which a Chinese newspaper has been successful in developing a radio stationwhich both serves its community and is commercially viable (Gao, 2006).

Also in Melbourne, the Chinese programme on community television attracts

some small-scale sponsorship (Gao, 2008).




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On free-to-air national network television, six days a week SBS

provides news services in Mandarin from the PRC’s CCTV Beijing, and in

Cantonese from TVB in Hong Kong, and much less regularly, it shows

films in these languages. There is no Chinese channel on either pay-TVservice, Foxtel or Optus, though there once was a Cantonese channel for

a brief time on the latter, and from 1994 to 1998, another on the now

defunct Australis service (Sinclair et al., 2001: 48–51). There are two

Australian-based digital direct-to-home (DTH) satellite providers of

‘bouquets’ of foreign language channels – SelecTV, owned by the

Australian regional WIN Corporation, offers Italian, Greek and Spanish

(SelecTV, 2007); and UBI World TV boasts 80 television and 40 radio

channels in 12 Middle Eastern and European languages (Bodey, 2007;

UBI World TV, 2007) – but neither offers any channels in Chinese.

Rather, Chinese-language channels are only to be found on foreign-based

DTH services. The principal one is TVB Australia Pty Ltd, based in Hong Kong

and trading through an Australian office as Jadeworld, which offers 14

channels of news and entertainment in Cantonese and Mandarin. These are

based on TVB’s own channels in Hong Kong, plus other channels from the

Chinese-speaking world, notably CCTV4, the PRC’s international channel in

Mandarin (JadeWorld, 2007). TVB has been a major broadcaster, producer

and international distributor of television in the Chinese-speaking worldsince the 1970s (Curtin, 2007). Although a subscription service, charging

renters over AU$70 per month, TVB Australia also carries advertising, and

reports that subscription rates reached ‘critical mass’ (this is the actual term

used in their report) and brought the service into profit as of 2006. TVB does

not declare the ratio of advertising to subscription income, but it is likely that

advertising revenue is fairly marginal to that from subscription, as there are

relatively few advertisers who can take advantage of the fact that these

channels reach the Chinese diaspora in so many countries. It should be

added that TVB also has an advertising/subscription channel in Europe, the

Chinese Channel, and offers Jadeworld channels over DirecTV in the US. In

addition, it licenses foreign distribution of its programmes over cable and

over the internet, and is active in the development of IPTV (Internet Protocol

Television) (Television Broadcasts Limited, 2006).

There is another service, New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV), which

is also a global service that carries advertising, but whereas TVB is a wholly

commercial advertising/subscription operation, NTDTV is free-to-air,

predominantly news and culture rather than entertainment in its content,and a non-profit venture of overseas Chinese dissident members of Falun

Gong. Based in New York, NTDTV claims 60,000 potential viewers in

Australia, but actual viewership is most likely much less. It can, however, be




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accessed over the internet, and no doubt provides a valuable alternative

source of news, although it is difficult to see it as a viable advertising

medium for targeting the bulk of Chinese Australians, nor therefore any

kind of real commercial competition for TVB (New Tang Dynasty Television,2008). The same can be said for the PRC’s CCTV, which is available free-to-

air in Australia once a one-off payment is made for the necessary satellite

dish, and which also carries advertising. It is also available on the internet.

Like NTDTV, CCTV is principally motivated by its political-ideological

purposes, rather than in commercializing its audiences (Gao, 2008). In brief,

given that there is no Chinese service on pay-TV, nor any bouquet on the

Australian-based DTH services, and negligible global competition of a

commercial nature, it appears that TVB, with its unequalled access to

popular programming and its expertise in distribution, has acquired if not a

virtual monopoly, then at least the desired level of critical mass, amongst

Chinese-speaking audiences in Australia.

While it is difficult to say just how much and what kind of advertising

Chinese-speakers are being exposed to, clearly their critical mass provides

them with a wide range of minority media, in the same process as

advertisers are being given access to them, even if those advertisers are

few. As the principal of an independent minority marketing agency in

Melbourne observes:The Chinese people have absolutely no need whatsoever to read, watch or

consume mainstream English media … These guys read daily newspapers like

Australia Chinese Daily [sic], they have 24-hour seven-day radio stations, and

they have Chinese pay TV out of Hong Kong … Once you plug into those

you don’t need anything else. (Kaufman, quoted in Bushell, 2007: 29)

So far, the internet has scarcely been mentioned in all this, but it

should be noted that the Chinese in Australia were already recognized as

early adopters of the internet a decade ago (Sinclair et al., 2001), at thesame time as Chinese news sites were proliferating internationally (Zhang

and Hao, 1997). Exceptional growth in the Chinese internet, both outside

as well as within the PRC has continued (The Economist , 2008), and, as

mentioned, services such as TVB are looking to the internet for television

distribution in the near future. Internet use will surely reinforce the

linguistic and cultural boundaries which minority media have already

established between Chinese-speaking and all other Australians, although

that is not to say that actual users necessarily restrict themselves only to

the virtual world of Chinese. With regard to both television and theinternet, it should not be forgotten that many Australians of Chinese

origin have been in Australia for a generation or more, and are fluent in

English, and so not dependent on Chinese-language media.




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‘Marketing to Hispanics’: the model of multicultural marketing

Whereas Chinese-speakers in Australia amount to just under 2.4 per cent

of the total population, ‘Hispanics’, also known as ‘Latinos’, in the US

constitute 14.8 per cent of that country’s total population, which is now

over 300 million. Numbering 44.3 million, this puts them ahead of the

‘Black’ and ‘Asian’ categories, at 40.2 and 14.9 million respectively. This

makes them the largest minority in the world’s largest minority population,

which totals over 100 million (US Census Bureau, 2007). The term

‘Hispanic’, and more recently ‘Latino’, are self-identifying categories in the

Census, which like ‘Chinese-speakers’ in Australia, bestow an apparent

unity upon a wealth of diversity. In both cases, there are two principal axes

of diversity, namely length of residence and country of origin. Just as new immigrants to Australia from the PRC are joining a

Chinese community with some members who can trace their families

back to the 1850s, so the daily arrivals of Latin Americans in the US are

crossing into a land where some ‘Latino’ families have lived since the

16th century. These are the ones who can truly say, ‘We did not, in fact,

come to the United States at all. The United States came to us’ (Valdez,

1972: xxxiii). And just as it still matters a great deal as to whether one

originated in Taiwan or the PRC, so Americans of ‘Latin’ heritage are

acutely aware of their ancestors’ origins: it is quite a different thing to be

a Puerto Rican, Cuban or Mexican-American. Even in language, although

the differences in how Spanish is spoken from one country of origin to

the next is not so great as the difference between Cantonese and

Mandarin, they are at least comparable to the order of difference between,

say, Australian English and Indian English.

However, both governmentality and marketing require that these

differences be subsumed into a single category, ‘Hispanic’, or in

accordance with the current preference of those so designated, ‘Latino’.This category of persons has been brought into being only in the last 40

or 50 years. ‘Prior to the 1970 census, the concept of Hispanics as a group

barely existed’, according to some demographers (Davis et al., 1983: 5),

previous attempts to classify the Latin-origin population having been

based on speaking Spanish (1940 Census) or having a Spanish surname

(1950 and 1960 censuses – that is, cultural criteria, as distinct from ‘race’,

which the US Census still measures separately (Rodriguez, 2000: 102).

Although the 1960s had seen some self-conscious political mobilization

of certain sectors of the Latino minority population in the form of the

Chicano movement, and the establishment of the first Spanish-language

television stations, it was not until the 1970s that the Latin-origin




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population began to acquire a separate identity as an ‘imagined

community’ (Anderson, 1991) with a national presence, and thus accessible

to advertisers.

Apart from trialing ‘Hispanic’ as a self-identifying category in the1970 Census, the other decisive development of the decade was the

advent of a national television network. Nearly all the Spanish-language

stations in that era were run by a US-based network closely linked to the

dominant television producer and broadcaster in Mexico. These were the

corporate ancestors of what came to be known respectively in the 1980s

as Univisión and Televisa. In 1976, all the stations and affiliates became

fully interconnected via satellite so that they could air the same

programming at the same time. In this way, a widely dispersed Spanish-

speaking population was formed into a national audience, an audience

which could be ‘sold’ as such to advertisers.

Thus, the framework was established for the commercialization of

these diverse peoples united by their Latin language and heritage. The

1980 Census not only counted a ‘critical mass’ of over 10 million people

who identified themselves as Hispanic, but brought out several of the kind

of demographic patterns that marketers like to see: the Hispanic population

was young, growing, and concentrated in identifiable geographical regions

(Korzenny and Korzenny, 2005). This in turn precipitated a wholecommercial discourse about ‘the Hispanic market’, including the first

market research studies, which revealed other endearing characteristics:

Hispanics had large families and were ‘brand loyal’, for instance, and

relatively speaking, were ‘the wealthiest Hispanics in the world’

(Yankelovich, Skelly and White, 1981; Guernica and Kasperuk, 1982).

Specialized Hispanic advertising agencies were set up by entrepreneurs

within the Hispanic community, such as Sosa and Associates in San

Antonio (Sosa, 1998), who declared the 1980s ‘the Decade of the Hispanic’.

In addition, the major US-based global advertising agencies established

their Hispanic divisions, as did the first major advertisers attracted to the

new market, notably Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble (Korzenny and

Korzenny, 2005). The marketing industry was paying attention too: for

instance, the leading trade journal, Advertising Age, began a new regular

feature, ‘Marketing to Hispanics’.

Attention from the corporate mainstream also extended to Spanish-

language media. After 25 years of turning a blind eye, the Federal

Communications Commission obliged Univisión to be divested of itsMexican ownership, while a Wall Street investment group opened up a

competing national network, Telemundo. In the early 1990s, the two

networks collaborated in having Nielsen set up a ratings measurement




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service specifically for Spanish-language television, thus neutralizing one

of the main objections advertisers had had against it – the lack of certainty

about the audience. Meanwhile, mainstream cable channels like CNN,

ESPN and HBO opened up Spanish-language versions of themselves for theUS Latino and Latin American markets (Sinclair, 1999). Within the first

few years of the new century, the mainstreaming of corporate control over

Spanish-language television seemed complete, with major US network

NBC buying out Telemundo in 2001, and a private equity consortium

acquiring control of Univisión in 2007 (Wentz, 2007a).

The emphasis in this account is on television, because US Latinos, as

an aggregated minority, are in the exceptional position of being courted

by two national free-to-air commercial networks, not to mention second

networks and cable channels owned by the same two companies, and

some competitors which have less than national coverage. It can be

added that the largest Spanish-language radio network is also owned by

Univisión. There is a significant Spanish-language press in the US, but

newspapers are city- or region-based, not national, and do not attract the

kind of advertisers nor the level of revenue which television does.

Furthermore, television is consolidating its predominance by forming the

base to link in with new media, thus enabling ever more intensive

commercialization of US Latinos.For, by no means is the US Spanish-speaking mediasphere limited to

‘old’ media: on the contrary. Over 80 per cent of Latinos are said to have

broadband access. Univisión launched a portal for digital video in 2006,

closely followed by Telemundo’s joint venture with Yahoo! Both are

offering streamed online programming. Whereas Telemundo is attracting

advertisers such as Procter & Gamble, perennially the world’s very biggest

advertiser, with a sponsorship model, Univisión has gone for ‘branded

content’, that is, the building of programming around the appearance of

a brand or brands. For example, a beauty contest reality show which

began in 2007 incorporates the brands of Ford, L’Oreal, retail chain JC

Penney and telecommunications company Cingular into the running of

the contest itself (Wentz, 2007b).

With this digital programming, Univisión can now offer advertisers

integrated, cross-platform time on both online and network television as

well as radio, while Telemundo seeks to build an audience which can

receive its programmes over mobile phones. Latinos are avid adopters

and users of mobile technologies, and spend more than the generalmarket average on wireless services (Martinez Ruiz-Velasco, 2007). This

receptiveness to new communication and information technologies has

been attributed to the relative youthfulness of the Latino population,




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and young Latinos’ enthusiastic participation in their cultural life

(McFarlane and Semple, 2007).

Indeed, the proliferation of Spanish-language media, and the fact that

Latinos can see programmes and advertising in their language on free-to-air television which reflects and expresses their lives, as distinct from the

lives of people in their distant, putative countries of origin, is an advantage

which Latinos as a minority enjoy, but which is unachievable for most

other minority populations in the world. The trade-off is that the cultural

identity which the media offer is an aggregated, pan-Hispanic one, driven

by commercial imperatives, and, to a considerable extent, its own

invention. As one major advertiser says, ‘The commonality is that all these

people speak Spanish, read Spanish print media, and watch the same TV’

(Unanue, quoted in Santamaria, 2003: 2).

The Spanish-language media thus have a vested interest in the

perpetuation of Spanish as a language community in the US, but the

reality is that while about three-quarters of Latinos say they speak Spanish

at home, more than half of them also say they speak English ‘very well’

(US Census Bureau, 2005). In other words, most Latinos are either

bilingual or English-dominant, and the Spanish-dominant are in the

minority. The latter are perceived by advertisers to be the most recently

arrived and least attractive commercial target. In 2006, for example, of the300 largest television advertisers, only 137 bought time on the leading

Spanish-language network, Univisión, causing the network to complain,

not for the first time, that the advertisers had ‘under-allocated’ in

proportion to the US Hispanic population (Wentz, 2007b). Furthermore,

those that do advertise pay only around half of what they are willing to

pay on the mainstream networks (Rodriguez, 1997). Recent years have

seen both Univisión and Telemundo strive to attract and hold younger,

bilingual Latinos with new specialized networks, programmes, and

language policy (Sinclair, 2006). Thus, even in the world’s largest and

wealthiest minority market, it is a struggle for the media to retain their

marginal position. On the other hand, this case also shows that ‘ethnic

groups are not impermeable closed boxes’ (Pires and Stanton, 2005: 78),

and that the cultural space between minority and mainstream is

continuous, not dichotomous.

Diasporas in the era of the satellite

In concluding his extensive mapping study of satellite television flows

around the world, Basque researcher Josu Amezaga Albizu confirms that

national markets are the main target for most broadcasts, in spite of the




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very considerable extent to which, beginning in the late 1970s, satellite

television opened up the borders of nation-states to programming from

other countries in their region and the globe (Amezaga Albizu, 2007:

256–57). This finding underscores the argument made at the outset, thatin spite of the recent decades of media globalization and the proliferation

of new media, national network television remains at the heart of social

communication and hence the preferred medium for advertisers.

However, our interest at this point is in the degree to which such

traditional nation-bound television has been overlaid and extended by

international televisual flows, particularly the spread of services in

languages other than those of the given nation. Amezaga Albizu relates

this diffusion to the growth in recent decades of migration from poor

countries to rich ones, but makes the point that a migrant population is

only a part of what constitutes a diasporic community (2007: 252).

Certainly this is true of both the cases examined in this article, given

their long histories and wide internal diversity, which is socioeconomic

as well as cultural.

Amezaga’s study measures the number of satellite ‘broadcasts’ (not

programmes, but channels or services) in the world, broken down by

their language of transmission, and their areas of diffusion. Unfortunately,

the data does not tell us whether or not a service carries advertising. Noris there a breakdown of state-sponsored international services, such as

China’s CCTV, India’s Doordarshan, Spain’s TVE, or Germany’s Deutsche

Welle, as distinct from purely commercial services, but the database does

distinguish between encrypted and free-to-air signals: the majority of

satellite services are encrypted and available in subscription ‘packages’.

Significantly, the services in the major world languages are of this kind,

although an exception is Chinese. This is attributable to the PRC’s efforts

to spread CCTV widely and freely as a political-ideological influence.

After Southeast Asia and the US, Australia and New Zealand form the

third largest area of diffusion of services in Chinese (Amezaga Albizu,

2007: 241–47). As we have seen, in Australia these are almost exclusively

generated out of TVB in Hong Kong, but the package includes CCTV,

which, in any case, is available independently. And it comes as no

surprise that, for Spanish, the US accounts for nearly all services received

in non-Spanish-speaking countries. Within the US itself, services in

Spanish account for half of the hundreds of non-English services, in 41

languages, which are available in that country; Chinese figuresprominently amongst the other languages, both in terms of number of

services available, and number of speakers (Amezaga Albizu, 2007: 245).

Amezaga estimates that ‘in the best of cases nine out of every 10 people




15/21


in the US who speak a language other than English at home have the

possibility of gaining access to satellite television broadcasts in their

family language’ (2007: 254). However, he cautions that this is in terms

of audience reach: there is no data on actual access and usage byaudiences under a footprint, but case studies he cites, both for the US

and Europe, suggest usage is ‘significant … habitual and not sporadic’

(Amezaga Albizu, 2007: 257).

It should be understood that by no means do these services all

originate from outside the country. For some years now, certain

communities, particularly in the US, have had the critical mass and

resources to generate their own television services, such as the Iranian

‘exilic television’ studied by Naficy (1993). As noted in the case of the

Latino audience, the advent of satellite distribution allowed minorities to

be aggregated into national audiences, at the same time as it made possible

transmission across borders and the growth of global narrowcasting, giving

diasporic communities a direct link to their country of origin. Either way,

the global consequence is, as Amezaga Albizu observes, that:

… people displaced from their countries of origin, or even their descendants,

are enthusiastically turning to television broadcasts in the language that they

took with them when they set out on their journey. In some cases, these are

broadcasts by the diasporic community itself, and in others they are madefrom the country of origin. But in both cases we find people in the privacy of

their homes immersing themselves for a time in a cultural milieu, or public

space, different from that beyond their front door, from that of the country

they inhabit. (2007: 240)

If the emphasis up to this point has been upon the ‘push’ factors that

incline minorities to seek out alternatives to the mainstream media, it is

now time to acknowledge the ‘pull’ factors: that is, what makes minority

media attractive to audiences, or what used to be called the media’s ‘uses

and gratifications’. Certainly, a prime attraction is driven by what Naficycalled ‘epistephilia’ – ‘the desire to know’ (1993: 107). Specifically, minority

audiences want to know what is happening in their nation of origin, and

perhaps elsewhere in the diaspora. As Amezaga correctly observes, such

media can make diasporic peoples in different nations more aware of each

other, creating a lateral orientation to others like themselves in other

nations, rather than to the others in the nation where they have come to

reside. As well as news and information, there is the appeal of

entertainment in one’s own language, and with culturally familiar music,humour, narrative styles and genres. Although such material might seem

to encourage nostalgia, the fact that satellite services bring news and

entertainment from the present rather than from the past means that




16/21


diasporic peoples can stay in touch with the changing reality of their home

culture, rather than carry an ossified version of it in their memory, and

perhaps be more critically engaged with it as a consequence.

As this article has argued, satellite television services, and to a lesserextent other minority media, are able to form audiences on the basis of

meeting such desires amongst diasporic peoples, but find it difficult to

‘sell’ such audiences to advertisers. This is the probable reason for the

world-wide predominance of subscription services as an alternative

funding model, although it is recognized that several such services carry

an indeterminate amount of advertising, a useful topic for future research.

In the case of Chinese speakers in Australia, the only minority group with

the necessary critical mass to form a market, we have seen that although

they can sustain a host of newspapers and one successful radio station at

the local level, when it comes to television, they must opt for global

subscription/advertising services.

Spanish-speaking minorities in the US are in a unique position in

that they are served by two national television networks, not to mention

abundant local press and radio media. The scale of this audience is great

enough to merit the production of both programming and advertising

specifically for them, rather than their being seen as just another part of

an international diasporic audience, like the Australian Chinese. Yet evenhere, there is an aggregation process at work which emphasizes the unity

wrought by the speaking of Spanish at the expense of actual diversity, in

which people identify themselves as Mexican-American, Cuban-American,

or even just American.

Identity as you like it

Before concluding, some consideration of the nature of minority identity

is in order. As Pires and Stanton remind us, ‘ … ethnic group membership

arises from ascription both by the self and by others’ (2005: 10). That is,

while the dominant society assigns minority identity on the basis of

signifiers such as physical appearance, language use, and the various

cultural stereotypes triggered by these, individuals so ascribed must also,

in the same process, assume, resist, or otherwise negotiate such identity

for themselves. In some circumstances, even under benign policy regimes

such as multiculturalism, minority identity might be borne as something

of a burden, and minority media use becomes correspondingly ratherdutiful, a responsibility to one’s otherness. More characteristically, in the

case of new migrants, minority media can provide a cultural comfort

zone as well as a necessary and welcome means of support as they acquire




17/21


the life-skills to adjust to their new environment. Yet even people in such

circumstances are unlikely to be dependent on minority media alone –

previous research suggests that even those who are the most recently

arrived, and have the least skills in English, will make some use ofmainstream media, albeit sometimes in unexpected ways (Sinclair et al.,

2001). As for those with longer standing, even over generations, in the

host country, who have acquired the appropriate skills in its language

but who have also retained the language of their country of origin, the

use of minority media becomes more a matter of choosing to maintain

their minority identity.

However, we should not think of these circumstances as two fixed,

mutually exclusive, dichotomous conditions of minority status – the

marooned victim versus the streetwise parvenu, with the individual

obliged to successfully negotiate the transition from one state to the

other. Such a notion of being ‘caught between two cultures’ is a cliché

that research and theory thankfully has left behind. Even the idea of an

intervening hybrid ‘third culture’ does not go far enough in breaking

down the persistent assumption that cultural identity is a fixed,

bounded and unitary characteristic of the person. Rather, as Melucci

has it, cultural identity involves ‘constant negotiation among different

parts of the self, among different times of the self, and among thedifferent settings or systems to which each of us belongs’ (1996: 49).

This implies co-existing, multiple levels of identity which the person

can mobilize in response to how they are interpellated by different

discourses. To cast this in terms of audiences for television services,

where such services are available at a range of levels from the local

(such as community television), through the national (for instance,

NBC and Univisión in the US), to the global (such as CNN or Jadeworld),

we would expect to find that real-world individuals (as distinct from

the subjects of theory) can and do enjoy television at each of these

levels, and without necessarily any sense of conflict. Importantly, if

someone is a regular viewer of Univisión, or subscribes to a global

service like Jadeworld, it does not mean they never watch national, free-

to-air network television: the global does not necessarily drive out the

national and the local, but rather, adds ‘another layer of complexity’ to

our postmodern cultural choices and corresponding identities

(Ferguson, quoted in Sinclair, 2004: 75).

Nevertheless, the marginalization of minorities in national networktelevision, and the fact that they have recourse to alternative services,

whether national or global, in their own language, does mean that they

are set apart from the majority society. This in turn means that they are




18/21


less accessible to advertisers than is the mainstream, except for quite

specific minorities with critical mass who are targeted by a relatively small

number of quite specific advertisers. At first sight, such haven from the

pervasive commercialization of capitalist modernity might seem to be anenviable condition, but if we accept the argument that ‘it is in consumerism

that we most express our sense of social belonging’ (Davidson, 1992: 124),

then that condition becomes another form of cultural alienation from the

nation in which diasporic individuals find themselves. National networked

free-to-air commercial television, in its dual historical role of nation

building and the forming of national markets for advertisers, has created

contemporary developed nations as ‘imagined communities of consumption’

(Foster, 1991: 250). Thus, in addition to diffuse popular traditions and

narratives of national belonging, and the ‘shared meanings’ of nationhood

expressed in televisual and media culture in general, branded goods, ‘as

advertised on television’, also become mediators of membership of the

nation. To be at the margins of the world of goods so created, is to live a

restricted form of the citizen-consumership which links us to our

contemporary nations, and thus comprises a diminished cultural citizenship.

Acknowledgment

This paper is an output from a programme of research under ARC Discovery – Project,

DP0556 419, ‘Globalisation and the Media in Australia’, funded 2005–2009. The author

gratefully acknowledges the ARC’s financial support, and the research assistance

provided to the programme by Dr. Rowan Wilken.

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Biographical note

John Sinclair is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the Australian

Centre at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Latin American Television:

A Global View (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Televisión: Comunicación Global y

Regionalización (Gedisa, 2000). He is co-editor of New Patterns in Global Television:

Peripheral Vision (Oxford University Press, 1996), Floating Lives: The Media of Asian

Diasporas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) and Contemporary World Television (British

Film Institute, 2004).

Address : The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, 137 Barry Street, Carlton,

Victoria 3053, Australia. [email: [email protected]]


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