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Beata Klimkiewicz

PARTICIPATION OF ETHNIC MINORITIES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
(interim report)

My research project aims at finding a new model for participation of ethnic minorities in the public sphere. This model is intended to suggest a range of policies to be overtaken to improve ethnic minority involvement in the media as main channels of public participation.
My overall thesis is, that an implicit communication model which is used by most of the people involved in the political process – from legislators and government officials, to journalists, ethnic minority leaders, political activists – is inadequate. It does not respond to such a condition of civil society as ethnic diversity. Indeed, its logical expression in polyethnic and communication rights still lacks implementation within the public sphere.
The structure of my work conceptually comprises of 4 basic elements: public sphere, ethnicity, representation, practice and policy. I use two cases for empirical analysis: a British case as an example of Western model and a Polish case as an example of East-European model.
The empirical analysis of representations of public ethnicity is conducted through:
- qualitative and quantitative analysis of media discourses
The empirical analysis of practices through wihich ethnicity is represented in the public sphere is conducted as
- qualitative and quantitative analisys of journalistic and editorial practices
The empirical analysis of policies by which ethnicity becomes public is conducted as:
- qualitative analysis of communication policies.
The materials used for empirical investigation of media representations consist of all types of media discourse despite of advertisement, sport and business/economy part, that appeared in the selected British and Polish media during the first part of 1997. Selected were all news reports, commentaries and feature articles about ethnic affairs.
I used following quality papers and television programmes: the Guardian, the Independent, the Times, the Observer, BBC’s 9 o’clock news (within the British public sphere) and Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Wprost, Polityka, Wiadomoœci – TVP (within the Polish public sphere).
Main categories studied in quantitative media analysis were ethnic events – all news, articles, commentaries related to ethnic minorities. Within ethnic events, I measured following criteria: frequency of topics (such as crime, discrimination, civic participation, education, culture and etnertainment, terrorism, ethnic politics, etc), frequency of actors (such as government, political parties, ethnic groups, police, etc) and roles they played (active or passive, as agents or victims of an action; or as positive, negative or neutral agents or victims), frequency of ethnic groups (such as Jews, Romas, Scots, Ukrainians, Afro-Carribeans, etc) and finally, frequency of ethnic stories (consisting of ethnic events). Selected ethnic stories – those with the biggest frequency in the researched media, were examined further through qualitative discourse analysis.
Among the most frequent topics of the British press appear terrorism and crime, where ethnic minorities are agents of the action (Guardian – 21%, Times – 22%, Independent – 14,4%, Observer – 10,6%), while in the Polish press frequency of topics is more diversified – for Gazeta Wyborcza most frequent topic is historical controversies (17,2%), for Rzeczpospolitagovernment policy towards ethnic minorities (10,5%), for Wprostimmigration (40%) and for Polityka discrimination, where ethnic minorities are its victims (33,3%).
As for actors, the most frequent ones for the British press are the government (Independent 9,5%, Times 10,3%, Guardian 9,7%, Observer 9,9%) and IRA (Guardian 8,3%, Observer 6,3%, Independent 6,9%; Times 8%). At the same time, the participation of all powerful actors (PA) - government + police + court + army + parliament + Queen+ prison services + CRE - in the British press is almost in all cases lower than the participation of all ethnic minorities (EM) together (Times: PA – 22,6%, EM – 30,4%; Independent: PA -18,9%, EM –31%, Guardian: PA – 24%, EM – 30%, Observer: PA – 18%, EM – 43,2%).
In the Polish press, most frequent actors appear to be Poles and Polish diaspora (Gazeta Wyborcza 14%, Rzeczpospolita 8,4%, Polityka 10,3%, Wprost 4%) and Jews and Jewish diaspora (Gazeta Wyborcza 10,4%, Rzeczpospolita 10,5%, Polityka 12,8%, Wprost 16%). Similarly, as in the British press, ethnic minorities together have more frequent coverage than all powerful actors (Gazeta Wyborcza: PA – 20,8%, EM – 34,9%; Rzeczpospolita: PA -27,3; EM – 41,3%; Polityka: PA – 12,9, EM – 51,3%, Wprost: PA – 16%, EM – 48%).
An overall assumption stemming from the findings is that in the British media we may find mirror image in the roles and relations of events actors: when they are agents, ethnic minorities tend to be more often responsible for negative actions, and when they are passive actors then they are more often represented as victims. In majority of stories, this image is framed by certain political process or action. Therefore, political parties are often involved in the definition or interpretation of ethnic events as their main actors. On the other side, the Polish media offer less polarized image of ethnic minorities, which is in fact, a result of ghettoization from the political discourse. Thus, political parties are almost absent from definition and interpretation of ethnic stories in the Polish media and ethnic minorities are shown mostly as subjects of folklorization.
In discourse analysis, I focused on devolution, Roisin McAliskey’s case, participation of ethnic minorities in 97’ elections, Sarwar’s sleaze case, Stephen Lawrence’s case, Stephen Restorick’s case in the British media and on recompensation of Jewish property, extradition of Mandugeqich, 50th anniversary of Action ‘Vistula’, arson attack of Nozyk’s synagoge, Festival of Ukrainian Culture, in the Polish media.
In most general terms, discourse analysis showed, that the British media represent ethnic minorities twice or three times more than the Polish media. The topics reflect political involvement of the ethnic minorities in the public sphere, but mostly as victims of racism or discrimination (Roisin McAliskey’s case and Stephen Lawrence’s case) or agents of crime or terrorism (Stephen Restorick’s case and Sarwar’s sleaze case). Therefore, again the political parties are more frequent actors than in the Polish media. The British media almost exclusively lack stories on everyday life of ethnic minorities, on history, education and basic features of their culture. This leads to sharp polarization of ethnic minorities who could participate in the public sphere either as victims of discrimination or agents of crime, depriving them of a possibility to address issues that may enhance exercising their citizenship rights – as right to education, right to communication, etc.
The ethnic minorities are rare actors in the Polish media. Their representation focuses mostly on passive roles (as in arson attack on Nozyk’s synagoge or extradition of Mandugeqis ). Almost in all cases (with the exception the Congress of Ukrainians in Poland), the ethnic minorities are subjects of media representations without any possibility to shape the way they are portrayed. Discourse focuses on historical controversies or grievances (as in 50th anniversary of Action "Vistula") or on most ‘peculiar and strange’ features of minority cultures. Unlikely, in the British pattern, the participation of ethnic minorities in the Polish public sphere is largely reduced to ghettoization. Representations of ethnic minorities are in large extent constructed by the media professionals (almost exclusively of not minority origin) and reported back to the ethnic minorities as a distillation of what they are and what they think, but without their own participation.
Similarly as discourse analysis, journalistic and editorial practices are studied through quantitative and qualitative research. Questionaries with 3 coded questions were basis for quantitative analysis. Collected data show, that for Polish editors, the most interesting and important topics are crime and discrimination when ethnic minorities are its victims and less important education. The same attitude was expressed by the British editors. At the same time, the Polish editors consider Ukrainian and Jewish minority as most interesting. For British editors, the most interesting minorities are Irishmen, Scots and Blacks. Most of editors explained their opinion by ‘social/or ethnic structure’ of the British society. In the Polish case, editors rather attempted to emphasize historical importance of a given minority in tradition of Polish culture.
Communication policy towards ethnic minorities has two different patterns in Great Britain and Poland. In Britain, the policy focuses on media campaigns administered mainly by CRE (Commission for Racial Equality), and especially on advertising as public education work targeting vast areas of the country. Among these are: education posters for schools, personal responsibility campaigns (for example‘Know your rights’, etc) and other campaigns with duversified publicity materials produced (among them are often posters, magazines, badges, adverts, postcards, folders, brochures or souvenirs). CRE does not support financially ethnic minority press or radio stations On the contrary, in Poland, the communication policy of the government (administered exclusively by the Ministry of Culture and Art) focuses on funding ethnic minority media, mostly in minority languages. In 1998 for instance, the Polish government subsidized 33 ethnic papers, among which 20 were published in minority languages. There is no visible effort to change this policy to reach broader public beyond boundaries of ghettoization. The only exception is supporting ethnic festivals that obviously attract national media and thus promote ethnic minority culture mostly as folk art.
While strategy of CRE communication campaigns is based on extensive social research conducted under the working title Stereotyping and racism , Polish Ministry of Culture draws outlines for its ‘communication policy’ from working meetings with senior editors of subsidized papers. It may sound obvious, that the chief editors are not very interesting in changing a status quo enabling them produce newspapers or magazines (to start up and running costs of radio and television are too high to be taken even to consideration) for closed and strictly defined readership. By and large, there is neither any attempt of ‘ethnic projection’ before the public nor editorial ineterest in challenging the public opinion or at least some stereotypes remainig in it for decades even though ethnic structure of the Polish society has changed to a large extent.
As for now, conclusions of my research could be easily subsumed as following: the media are essential to the possibility of democracy and they are also main channels of public participation of ethnic minorities within broader societies. To fully enjoy citizenship rights, ethnic minorities do not need to be subject of the media, (and thus just passive ‘elements’ of the public ethnicity) but they should shape the media and participate actively in forming of the public ethnicity. Hence, there is not enough to improve instruments only – journalistic practices that will enhance ethnic minority representations, but to improve communication policies leading to greater involvement of ethnic minorities in the media management structures.
Without doubt, the state is not only actor enabling multi-ethnic public sphere to flourish. To inform policy debates and impact upon the practices of media personel, the model of public ethnicity must resonate with interest groups and the identity politics of ethnic communities first.