Ethnic Minority Networks

Development

By the late 1920s, a few American radio stations were carrying scheduled ethnic minority broadcasts, usually for an hour or less per day. Other countries took similarly cautious approaches. The New Zealand Broadcasting Service first offered continuously scheduled programming in Maori only in 1942: a newscast once a week for five minutes. Norway's NRK began scheduled broadcasts in Sami in 1946. Minority networks did not [Page 544]emerge until the 1960s, and then only gradually: a few to several hours of programming per day, and often for less than the full week. If the networks were part of a larger national public service broadcaster (PSB)—the BBC's Asian Network, for example—they sometimes lacked such support as proportional budgets, “good” broadcast frequencies and sufficient transmitter power, full access to production facilities, or “status” among their mainstream peers. If the networks were commercial services, as with the U.S. Spanish language television networks Univision and Telemundo, finances tended to be tight and network-originated programming limited. (Both of those networks still rely predominantly on material produced in Latin America for Latin American audiences.)

Whether commercial or public, ethnic/linguistic networks have suffered from a paucity of local outlets through which to disseminate programs, but also from which to receive program material. They have created programming, but have done little to encourage local outlets to produce programs that could be carried by the networks, which has limited the degree to which networks reflect local ethnic communities. A few networks have assisted growth of local stations and carried their programming, as has happened with Inuit radio in Canada starting in 1970 with the foundation of the CBC Northern Service. More often, they were highly centralized, as was the U.S. Black Entertainment Television (BET, founded in 1980) network. BET did little to support the establishment and growth of black-owned and -operated local TV stations, (they numbered 24 in 1991, dropping to 22 by 2006) or to receive material from them.

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