Quick reality-check: Turn on your TV or a live streaming of a public media channel. Open your window and have a look at the people you see walking on the street. Compare the what you see on the screen and on the street - ask yourself to what extent the images shown by the public media overlap with what you notice when looking out of the window. Turn on the radio on and listen to the way the presenters speak. Listen or recollect the sound of people talking on the street. Place these two experiences next to each other and notice how similar they are - how close is the language on the radio to the one you can hear on the street everyday?
As a child and teenager, I had the fortunate chance to spend hours on end in the local radio station and newsroom. I remember to this day the intensive training the newly hired people were going through before they were allowed to go live. During this time they were working on losing or minimising their regional accent and on taking on the”radio-diction”. The latter involved learning a new way of looking at a sentence, articulating it differently by stressing certain words and pausing for effect, which resulted also from breathing in a special manner. I met there persons who could not acquire these skills in the given timeframe. And people who persisted in their speech deviation such as a strong pronunciation of a consonant (e.g. /r/ or /s/) or in maintaining their regional accent. They did not make it past the trial period.
If you prefer to listen to this article instead of reading it, I recorded it for you at the end of this page.
Fast forward twenty years later to Germany 2020. I took part in this year’s Mikopa conference focused on „People and institutions for communication and participation“. The diverse presentations I attended online brought the participants behind the curtains of European media institutions and provided a magnifying lens for noticing their slow development towards embracing diversity. Although there was a different topic planned for each day – academic perspective, formats, institutions, initiatives -, there was one subject that was insistently brought up by the attending public. Namely the on-going discrimination towards people speaking the language with a regional or a foreign accent. The invited journalists agree: this is not a myth, but a real obstacle for people with migrational background to get a chance to be allowed before the microphone. More often than not, this approach is joined with unpaid internship programmes lasting for months. Subsequently, the ones who have not yet brushed off their “non-professional” accent feel discouraged to choose a career in Journalism.
“And where is the problem?
… It is a tough competition to get before the camera or the microphone even in the local media”, you might reply. And as much as I agree to this statement, I stumble upon an important part left out of this equation. Namely that the percentage of persons with migrational background increases each year and recruiting through the lens of native-like accent bans the access of one third up to half of the population in Germany. So I’m asking myself:
How fair is this, given the demographic diversity we experience more and more in the 21st century?
There are institutions which, in spite of obvious social changes, consciously stick to the values established long time ago. The Church, for example. And (at least partially) the educational system. I’m wondering if the media should be part of this category. It was mentioned during the Mikopa conference that the public broadcasting would better not only reflect today’s society as it is, but also how it should be. In other words, its mission should aim at shaping behaviour and role-modelling. However, the invited panellists on that day could barely think of a role-model for their or their parents’ migrational experience that had been promoted in the media. Instead, individual initiatives such as a football player putting on the activist’s hat and getting involved in social-oriented projects or success stories in their own family came to mind.
This can lead us to concluding that the current media do not offer content which reflects situations that people with migrational background relate to. And that the currently available programmes are designed rather for monolingual, monocultural viewers or listeners (if such a combination still exists). It is indeed difficult to target an audience if you do not know it well enough. According to one of the studies presented at the Mikopa conference, even well-established media institutions like the BBC in UK have troubles meeting their audience-related diversity targets.
And here is where I see a major contradiction. Journalists with migrational background can easily relate to their first-hand experiences for creating appealing content for people with similar upbringing. So if exactly these people have troubles making their voices heard on public media, how can media institutions bridge the gap to an audience that awaits to finally be addressed?
And what could go so wrong if someone with a regional or foreign accent narrated a story or presented the news?
In my view, this preference for the old values stems from a fright to lose the existing audience. Yes, yes, that utopian monolingual, monocultural one that I mentioned earlier. But we are now in the social media era, more and more confined to our social bubbles. Therefore, even if the audience declares itself unready to give up established practices like hearing native-like pronunciation on TV and on the radio, doesn’t it make sense for the media to go the extra mile and educate its followers? For example, by framing it in a diversity initiative that is made transparent to the public. Something like “We’ve taken a good look around and we realised we want our programmes to reflect today’s society to a greater extent. Therefore in the next months we will diversify our content, format and our team in order to achieve this goal. Please support us in this endeavour.”
Alternative solutions
While public broadcasters seem to keep postponing this important step, the streaming industry is already ahead in offering a broad range of programmes with more up to date content in various languages. A Mikopa conference panelist recalled her initial shock when watching a movie where BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, (and) People of Color) were the positive characters and light-haired female protagonists were the villains. Could it be that the movie industry is slowly aligning to the society as we now know it?
The attempt is there, considering the recently strictly-defined quotas for the 2024 Oscar competition. This is the way chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for tackling the long-disputed diversity gap related to their awards. Here is how the Academy President David Rubin and the Academy CEO Dawn Hudson contextualised this new initiative: “The aperture must widen to reflect our diverse global population in both the creation of motion pictures and in the audiences who connect with them. The Academy is committed to playing a vital role in helping make this a reality. (…) We believe these inclusion standards will be a catalyst for long-lasting, essential change in our industry.”
Long-lasting, essential change in terms of diversity is needed also in the public media – this was one of the main conclusions drawn unanimously at the Mikopa conference this year. Not sprints, but a committed sign-up for the marathon. Dr. Dietmar Schiller‘s definition says it all: “Diversity is not a project, but a process“.
“Free your mind, and the rest will follow” – this was the encouragement launched by the American female group En Vogue back in 1992. Twenty eight years later, I consider it’s high time we start defogging our internal mirrors, just like we do this time of year with the external ones attached to the car. And we could also open our eyes and ears to the colourful images and sounds on the street, so that they appear to us just as natural on public television and on the radio.
Yours confidently,
Corina