‘Telling the Brown Stories’: An Examination of Identity in the Ethnic Media of Multigenerational Immigrant Communities

Abstract

Ethnic media models tend to categorise ethnic news media as alternative, diasporic, community or ethnic minority language media. This paper argues for a different way of looking at Pasifika news media that recognises identity as a dominant force in their construction and practice. Through analysis of the producers' discursive practices and the texts of two major Pasifika media in Aotearoa/New Zealand—Tagata Pasifika and Spasifik—this paper finds that identity work lies at the heart of what Pasifika news media do. Producers deliberately set out to do Pasifika identity and be the Pasifika voice: about and for all Pasifika. Yet, the texts studied here suggest that by emphasising identity, Pasifika news media risk falling back on well-established, often racialised, versions of Pasifika identity that misrepresent the diverse and shifting identities of New Zealand's Pasifika population, especially its New Zealand-born youth. An examination of ethnic minority news media in identity terms, then, can usefully illuminate powerful production forces, including the influence of minority communities and their elites on ethnic minority media.