Ethnic Media in the News

First Black Brazilian TV Station
A bit more than a century after Brazil became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery comes its first-ever Black owned and operated television station, TV da Gente, or, "our TV."

On the heels of his success as first a samba singer and then a variety show host, da Gente's owner, Jose de Paula Neto launched his venture on November 22, Brazil's black pride day, and is hopeful that this endeavor will provide the exposure and opportunity that has been sorely lacking to the roughly180 million Afro-Brazilians that comprise about one half of Brazil's population. As a former resident of the infamous Sao Paulo slums, Neto understands the need for inclusive programming. "Our country is marked by racial mixtures," Neto told the Guardian. "But the actual model of TV does not represent the majority of Brazilians. We are trying to help our own people, given that nobody else seems to want to do it. This is where the real fight starts. Those who say they want an integrated Brazil will really have to start showing their faces now," Neto continued.

Though up against some boiler plate criticism (one white Brazilian blogger deemed the concept of a black-owned and operated TV station racist) and not-so-predictable financing hurdles from what Neto thought would be shoe-in investors (the oldest established Black network in the U.S., BET, said 'no deal' to the newborn station for securing content to be translated because the bottom line wasn't as attractive as the idea of a black-owned and operated Brazilian TV station), the station, which has secured enough financing to operate for six months, seems to be on to something.

France has Ethnic Media...and it was there before the Protests
The not-so-recent protest of fed up African and Arab French youth seemed to blindside mainstream French media. Why, they asked in broadcast commentary and print, were these youth so angry? The country's ethnic media editors, reporters and producers seem to have the answer--lack of representation. That's why they produce their own media.

For Hortense Nouvion, founder and editor of Cite Black, a magazine that covers the African culture of France, it seems that even something as simple as a black love story is too much to ask--so she created a forum where that would be the norm. "We don't have love stories, we don't have our TV, we don't have our media...The magazine is for a lot of people who don't see their face on TV," Nouvion told New America Media in December.

Ethnic media began making an appearance on the French market in the mid 1980s, when the government put some pressure on the airwaves to become more diverse, Reynald Blion, a program director at Panos, told Pacific News Service. But that took effect mostly in the realm of radio. France still cannot boast one ethnic-oriented television station or a daily ethnic newspaper--so there's still not really a space for daily reasoned reflection of the day's events as they relate to France's ethnic populations.

Read about French journalists' other ethnic media efforts here.