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Mainstream effort often tokenistic
Every evening this week, Darshan Sahota will roll down College Street in Toronto’s Little Italy, and take an elevator five storeys above ground to a sleek, state-of-the-art radio studio and settle in for a 3 1/2-hour broadcast that reaches a potential audience of hundreds of thousands.
When the on-air light flashes red, Sahota’s listeners will tune in to hear a broad-ranging variety show, with interviews, music and news. But if you’re reading about it here, in this newspaper, for the first time, you’re probably not exactly the target audience Sahota has in mind.
Sahota’s long-running program is entirely in Hindi and Urdu, beamed with clockwork-like consistency to a loyal community of listeners from the Indian, Pakistani, Afghan and Bangladeshi communities. He began the show in 1972, on CHW AM, and migrated over to CHIN-FM radio on College Street in 1992.
Sahota, in other words, is a veteran of this country’s ethnic media, a wide-ranging field that now comprises more than 120 radio and television shows, 536 publications, and more than 100 languages
Jun. 24, 2006. 09:43 AM
MURRAY WHYTE
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
Toronto Star

Being a veteran affords Sahota a long view, and a rewarding one. “When I started, there were maybe 20 hours a week on the radio, and one or two papers,” he says. “Now, you find Indian radio programs going neck and neck on three or four stations. There are many papers, in Punjabi and in Hindi. It shows that the demand has only grown.”
Indeed, in a city like Toronto, which has seen an explosion in immigrant populations in recent decades, the thirst for information — about a homeland, a community, or simply how to manage a strange, new world — is a massive, unquenchable constant.
But it also underscores the mainstream media’s struggle to keep pace with the changing population. An independent poll conducted by Solutions Research Group this year found that, among five major ethnic groups across the country, more than half of respondents at least “somewhat agreed” that the mainstream media put forth negative stereotypes about their ethnic groups.
In the poll, only Chinese Canadians and Italian Canadians fell below the 50 per cent barrier, and only just: Their numbers were 44 per cent and 42 per cent, respectively. The poll was conducted among 3,000 Canadians 16 years of age and over in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver metropolitan areas between June and August 2005. Depending on the ethnic group sample, the results are deemed to be accurate within 3.1 to 6.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
That helps explain why, when you look at the poll’s numbers on radio listenership, things turn upside-down. In Toronto, the top two radio stations on the whole are CBC Radio One and 680 News. Among ethnic groups polled, 680 News holds its own, but CBC drops off the map, replaced by non-mainstream broadcasters like Chinese-language Fairchild Radio and CHIN, which broadcasts in 32 different languages.
Sahota has seen some progress over the years, but not nearly enough. “The mainstream media, in my view, is what encourages ethnic communities to stay ethnic. They don’t seem to view them as Canadian,” he says. “It’s very black and white. If you carry on every day telling me, `I’m Indian, I’m Indian, I’m Indian,’ I’ll eventually say all right, if that’s what you’re happy with, that’s what I’ll be.”
Ethnic media is not just a product of distaste for the mainstream, though. “There is a need for these communities to connect when they first come here,” says Amir Hassanpour, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto who has studied the ethnic media in Canada. Hassanpour, who is from Iran, says first-generation immigrants rely on ethnic media more for practical purposes than as a haven from ethnic stereotypes.
“Canada is a very complex society, and the rule of law is very different here,” he says. “The main motivation for them is their survival here, and the ethnic media is how they learn,” he says.
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`Nobody believed CHIN could exist — they thought it was a passing fad.’
Lenny Lombardi, president
CHIN Radio
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Johnny Lombardi understood that long before any studies were initiated on media diversity. In 1966, Lombardi, an Italian immigrant, started CHIN radio, and by 1968, was broadcasting in 32 languages. Next week, CHIN will celebrate 40 years in business at its annual picnic, a cross-cultural extravaganza at the CNE grounds.
“Nobody believed it could exist — they thought it was a passing fad, that it would just fade away. It did everything but,” says Lenny Lombardi, Johnny’s son and current president of CHIN, now a multi-channel radio and television empire housed in sleek offices and studios on trendy College St.
Lombardi’s vision predated any official recognition of what a strong multicultural media could do for nation building. In 1985, the CRTC drafted its first ethnic broadcasting policy, drawn from the template Lombardi had been practising for almost 20 years.
“My dad’s goal was always to help people integrate. He would encourage people to stay, to become Canadian, to make it their home,” Lombardi says. “He knew that if people could flip on the radio and hear local programming in their own language from the local community, they would feel a much greater sense of belonging, and that’s extremely important.”
The communities have changed — largely integrated second- and third-generation Italians no longer need Italian-language programming — but burgeoning immigrant communities from China and South Asia have increased demand.
CHIN has adjusted, boosting Chinese-language programming from two hours a week 10 years ago to 60 hours now. At the same time, Italian has dropped from 60 to 11. The languages may have changed, but the mandate has not. “We’ve never seen a waning of that need, for multicultural broadcasting,” Lombardi says.
Thomas Saras, president of the Ethnic Media Association of Canada, says it was a typical pattern in the ethnic press: By the second or third generation, the native language was all but gone, replaced by English. The press of a particular culture then shifts from providing necessary information to being the glue for a cultural group spread out across the country.
“The cultural link we provide is a bridge for the whole community,” says Saras, the long-standing editor of Patrides North American Review, a newspaper published in Greek and English.
More important, perhaps, is the gap such ventures fill in the often-myopic mainstream coverage. Saras chafes at mainstream efforts to cover even his own venture, which, he says, often smack of tokenism or even condescension.
Worse, he says, is the mainstream press impulse to report on ethnic communities only when crisis strikes. The recent arrests of 17 Muslim men provide a prime example.
“Those things have a very negative effect on a community,” he says. “When you deal with a cultural group, you also need to deal with the positive aspects. Try to find something that shows you respect them — that’s how you gain trust.”
Trust, Sahota says, comes from the accepting difference, but also grasping what we have in common. “Sometimes, their views are so hurtful,” he says. “The mainstream media should understand that anybody from outside who is coming here is coming to be a Canadian.”
Saras says the mainstream media needs to understand that the goals of the ethnic press are not so different from their own. “Our job is to create a just society where everyone feels equal,” he says. “Someday, in the future, our children and grandchildren will meet. If we build this bridge now, no one will care where you’re from, or what your religion is.”