Mediating intercultural dialogue at what price?

Sara Wajid and Mike Jempson

“Any kind of harmony in a local community is deeply shaped by the character of the media.”
Bhikhu Parekh, 1 May 2008, Intercultural City Conference, Liverpool.

“If media keep highlighting ugly practices and situations of tension then a mood is created where people say ‘Immigrants are never going to settle and its never going to work’,” the author ofThe Parekh Report, the seminal work on multi-culturalism, told DiverCities . “Media plays a very important part.”

Professor Parekh cites the local media in Leicester as an example of good practice. “The city fathers said (to local media during a period of racial tension) ‘Let’s agree about the kind of Leicester we want; a Leicester in turmoil is not good for anyone’, so the media committed themselves – the editor of the Leicester Mercury in particular – to certain minimum principles, and that helped a great deal.”

The East London borough of Tower Hamlets chose a different route to promote intercultural communication. It produces East End Life (EEL), specifically established to reach both ethnic minority and white readers, looks like a conventional local paper with unusually high production values. It attracts more Bangladeshi readers than Bangladeshi papers produced in the area, and promotes positive representations of black and Asian youth.

EEL costs £1.3 million a year to produce. The Council puts in £340,000, with the rest raised through advertising, but half of it comes from the Council itself. Chris Payne, the paper’s commercial development manager, says “It’s the only paper that can ensure council advertisers’ market penetration of hard-to-reach communities. Equivalent ads in other local papers would cost the council six times as much.”
The paper has won awards and has circulation of 90,000. According to ICM market research, 70% of Bangladeshis in the area read EEL regularly compared with 18% who read the Bangla Mirror, while 51% of white readers say it is their favourite London paper.

EEL unquestionably creates a much-needed intercultural forum in an area which has traditionally been fraught with racial tension. It was the scene of clashes between the anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists and local anti-fascists in the 1930s, and the paper itself was created in direct response to electoral successes locally in the 1990s by the fascist British National Party (BNP).

However, its creation raises awkward questions about the limits of fostering intercultural dialogue through a top-down approach – illustrating Parekh’s concern about the danger of interculturalism being ‘prescriptive’.

Malcom Starbrook, editor of its commercial rival the East London Advertiser (ELA), accuses the council of wasting taxpayers’ money and jeopardising independent local journalism. He says it is a council propaganda tool “masquerading” as an independent publication. Seventy percent of respondents to a poll on ELA’s website asking ‘Is Tower Hamlets Council’s East End Life free paper a waste of money?’ said ‘Yes’.
Starbrook argues that the council is acting as a publisher and sees this battle as a test case, saying it threatens the independence of local journalism because it is taking away vital advertising revenue from competitors. “People choose to buy us but they can’t choose to reject the council’s propaganda through their door.”

However when local journalists set up the East End News (EEN) in 1981 to provide more representative local coverage with diversity in its newsroom (the BBC’s George Alagiah cut his journalistic teeth on the EEN) the then ELA management quickly moved to starve their competitor of advertising revenue.

By 2006 ELA’s circulation had dipped by almost two thirds to around 9,500, but that decline has been halted under new owners Archant who realised it was aimed at a traditional local paper readership – elderly white women – while Tower Hamlets has one of the highest proportions of ethnic minority residents in the country.

Starbrook has made a lot of changes and, he claims, it attracts a bigger proportion of young readers than its competitors. He admits, though, that the paper still has no black or Asian reporters.
“Local businesses want to advertise in a paper that’s upbeat and positive about the area, not in an editorial environment that’s all grime and crime.” He ascribes the paper’s popularity among ethnic-minority readers to the rounded and positive representations in the paper, the Somali and Bangladeshi language pages, and the fact that young Bangladeshis are not necessarily attracted to Sylheti language papers.

One perhaps unintended consequence of Tower Hamlets Council’s venture into intercultural publishing has been to challenge attitudes on the independent East London Advertiser and force up the range and standards of reporting up for the whole community. Professor Parekh would prefer such change to come about without the suspicion of coercion.