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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
1 7 7
Global Media and Communication [1742-7665(2009)5:2] Volume 5(2): 177–196
Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC:
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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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180 Global Media and Communication 5(2)
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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John Sinclair Minorities, media, marketing and marginalization 183
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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184 Global Media and Communication 5(2)
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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John Sinclair Minorities, media, marketing and marginalization 185
‘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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186 Global Media and Communication 5(2)
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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John Sinclair Minorities, media, marketing and marginalization 187
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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John Sinclair Minorities, media, marketing and marginalization 189
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
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190 Global Media and Communication 5(2)
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
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John Sinclair Minorities, media, marketing and marginalization 191
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
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192 Global Media and Communication 5(2)
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
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John Sinclair Minorities, media, marketing and marginalization 193
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]]
196 Global Media and Communication 5(2)