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Ethnic Media in Europe
media, diversity & pluralism
bridges to build…

A programme of the Institute Panos Paris to promote a renewal of information and analysis on today world’s divides for a better understanding by public opinion on key points of the international and intercultural relations, by supporting lasting collaborations and partnerships between ethnic media and mainstream media.


On one hand, numbers of studies have been carried out to analyze how media information on international and intercultural relations (i.e., development, immigration, discrimination…) impacts on public opinion. Yet the main focus of these studies is to analyze media images and stereotypes. Few are interested in information contents. In plus, several studies have looked at the role of the media in forming public opinion. Some show how the media contribute to shape the public’s perception of reality. Others show how the media influence the preoccupation of the public, not by saying what it should think but what it should think about.

On the other hand, public understanding of international and intercultural relations, with their divisions and exclusions, shows clearly the lack of information of the public opinion. Except for some specialized media – which, by definition, reach a limited fringe of public opinion - the information put out on these issues is limited to factual statements, with analysis or understanding of these situations, generally disconnected from the daily realities of the public and constrained by allocated resources according editorial choices.

Today, for encouraging better understanding by public opinion, a renewal of information content but also of the media interest on international and intercultural relations is fundamental.

So new approaches and analyses are essential if the public opinion is to reach a better understanding of the different worlds that surround them as well as their evolution.

Between mainstream media and community media, there is a new group of media players, emerging in Europe: the media of immigrant and ethnic minority groups, the ethnic media. From the United Kingdom to Italy, via France or the Netherlands, ethnic magazines and newspapers, as well as radio and television, are playing an increasingly important, if relatively invisible, role. Their recent expansion in Europe is explained precisely by the specificity of their content. Because they focus on both host and home societies, intercultural relations, issues such as integration, fight against discrimination, these media are intermediaries with expert knowledge, representing valuable bridges in a global context where the local and the global are in constant interplay.

Because they:

1/ offer a fresh view, cause of their cultural and spatial “multi-belongings”,

2/ focus part of their output on international relations and development issues in relation with the countries of origin, citizenship, fight against discrimination and social integration, regarding the host countries,

3/ link the local and global dimensions of these issues,

Ethnic and Diaspora media can introduce new information and analyses on the interdependencies of today’s world and feed the “agenda” of the mainstream media on these issues.

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Italy

COSPE

Netherlands