From immigration to immigrant: when the object becomes subject

the theme of immigration has long been mistreated by the media, in France as in all Western host countries. However, despite a long tradition both in terms of immigration and media production, the social sciences have been slow to take an interest in this issue.

1881 can be identified as a pivotal date. It was the year of the census when the milestone of one million immigrants was crossed, leading over the following decades to security tensions similar to those experienced in the contemporary period. It is also the year of the adoption of the text of the law on the freedom of the press which marks the entry into a new era, allowing a modernized and innovative press to know its expansion, to become on the eve of the World War I one of the most powerful and prosperous in the world. It is finally the historic moment when the nation-state finishes consolidating itself, when, in 1882, Ernest Renan delivers his famous lecture “What is a nation? at the Sorbonne.

The simultaneity of these events is important as we now know how certain forms of mass mediation played a major role in imagining the ideal nation and facilitating the spread of the nation-state model in the colonized world.

All the media vectors (press, cinema, literature, radio, advertising, and later, television) allowed the standardization of popular ideologies as well as their homogenization and their exploitation for the purposes of national identity propaganda.

But it was in the Anglo-Saxon world, and in the United States in particular, that the first research on the intersecting theme of immigration and the media was carried out. Robert Ezra Park, a sociologist from the Chicago School, was one of the first to take an interest in it, from the beginning of the 20th century.

At the same time, the anthropology of the media is essential in the Anglo-Saxon area by the specificity of its field, a large number of researches, and the theoretical frameworks already produced. Gradually, the disciplinary fields dedicated to reception and media audiences (reception studies), immigration (cultural studies), and ethnic media (ethnic media) intersect in several places.

Today, the scientific imbalance between the Anglo-Saxon and French-speaking areas persists. Although we have excellent ethnographic, anthropological, sociological, and geographical studies of migratory movements, few of them are interested in the production of “public emissivity”, that is to say in the media messages produced by the ethnic minorities. Similarly, works dedicated to the media field combining the notions of public space and representation remain silent on the production of meaning, symbolic discourse, and the creation of a social imaginary by the media in the field of immigration or minority fact. So much so that sometimes only Anglophone studies highlight this or that specificity of the French case.

The representation and place of immigration as well as the fact of the minority in the media in France, therefore, remains a question whose interest is relatively recent in the social sciences.

However, several monographs allow us to highlight a strong trend: the shift, in media treatment, from object to subject, even from object to the actor, that is to say from immigration to people who come from it. This historical process takes root in the aftermath of the Second World War, as Édouard Mills-Affif and Yvan Gastaut have shown very well. But a major change took place during the 1990s. Until then, the media mainly discussed the place of immigration and immigrants. Immigration is a phenomenon that is (sometimes) reported, but the media are not yet sensitive to the involvement of people from it. This is the hour of the glory of so-called “specific” programs, which are aimed at a well-defined audience, in this case, people with an immigrant background. In republican and secular France, these (rare) broadcasts, mostly financed by the former Social Action Fund (fas, which became failed then acsé) and broadcast on public channels, aim to play a role in the process of integrating immigrant workers who have come to settle in France, and thus improving intercultural relations.

From the 1990s, the theme of the image of immigrants in the media took off and the number of productions – both media and scientific on this theme – accelerated. This pivotal period is also the time during which the question of representation will complete that of the representativeness of those who have long been called "people of immigrant origin" and whom some now prefer to call "visible minorities".

In addition to the question of presence, there is the question of the image given and produced by the media on the populations resulting from migrations and their descendants. To the first question of a negative or positive image reflected by the different productions are added those relating to the type of programs concerned or even the time or frequency of programming. This change in perspective is emerging under the cross-influence of the British audiovisual sector and the new generations who, in France, are seeking to take charge of the given image of their lives and their future. It was during this period that more and more regular glances - certainly more quantitative than qualitative - were to be focused on productions and achievements from across the Channel and across the Atlantic.

Immigration as an object: the misrepresentation of immigrants, some striking themes

The historical perspective offered by documentary filmmaker Édouard Mills-Affif, who inventoried the news magazines and documentaries devoted to immigration broadcast on French television between 1960 and 1986. made visible the misrepresentation of immigrants. One of its conclusions shows an absence of linearity, a presence in fits and starts, which makes it impossible to historically reconstruct the fact of migration from audiovisual archives alone. It underlines the significance of ideological a priori on the figure of the immigrant as an individual always in suffering, which leads in particular to ignoring entire populations as soon as their social situation becomes commonplace. Hence the media invisibility of the Italians, Poles, Spaniards, or later the Portuguese and the focus on Algerians or, to a lesser extent, on black Africans, who alone would embody the "problem" of immigration gradually placed at the center of concerns. Twenty years later, the media are trying to show more positive figures, but the groups of the oldest immigration and/or the closest geographically and culturally (Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Portuguese) are largely absent from the representations. Today, it is blacks who are overrepresented on French television.

Beyond the strict numerical representation, a qualitative representation is of crucial importance. Among the salient themes related to media coverage of immigration or minority issues, some allow us to better understand the ins and outs of the media misrepresentation of immigrants.

From “immigrants” to “visible minorities”

The 2000s marked a major turning point in the treatment and media participation of “people with an immigrant background”. While the issue of minorities, and even more so of ethnic and/or visible minorities, has always been difficult to address in France, it is however increasingly used in the public sphere.

Used in an often militant perspective, the use of the expression “visible minority” has been facilitated by the benevolence of the public authorities since the beginning of the decade. This orientation is not without impact on the media treatment of the minority fact. In 2000, the Collectif Égalité denounced the absence of blacks – but also of other ethnic minorities such as North Africans or Asians and their descendants – within the French audiovisual sector (television, cinema). More specifically, the Collectif Égalité criticizes the media for distorting the image of visible minorities and the different cultures that make up French society, whose members feel penalized by under-representation or misrepresentation as well as by the difficulties encountered by the profession. journalist to access the media.

Although the debate is recent, the multitude of press articles and radio and television programs bear witness to the fact that the question of the television representation of ethnic minorities is no longer a taboo subject in France. In 2000, Marie-France Malonga was commissioned by the Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA) to produce a report on the "presence and representation of 'visible minorities' on French television", the aim of which was to update the survey ara (Audiovisual Encounters Association) produced by the cinema in 1991.

In 2004, France Télévisions presented a plan for the integration of minorities on the air.

On November 22, 2005, when France was barely emerging from three weeks of highly publicized urban violence, the 11 presidents of the main channels and audiovisual groups were summoned to the Élysée Palace by President Jacques Chirac to discuss questions relating to “diversity ” and to the representation of minorities. For the first time in France, public institutions are taking a direct interest in the question of the representativeness and representation of “visible minorities” within the media.