Party Vibe

I guess there probably wasn’t such a thing as black reporters/journalists back then (I get the impression “alternative media” in USA only arrived towards the end of the 1960s) and even in my country until the late 1980s (!) American soul music as well as early forms of EDM and what is now called “urban music” in UK was called “black music” in the charts (in spite of its fans being an increasingly diverse group of people).

I think the media delberately “stirring the pot to increase ratings” is much more recent; from 1980s/90s when “liberal media” allowed more controversial stuff to be discussed in the first place and now more so with the dependence on Internet advertising. This last IMO is genuinely dangerous as it allows extremists with deep pockets to get an even more targeted platform.

As a personal example I was experimenting with writing and reading barcodes for asset tagging. Before I was able to purchase a standalone USB reader I evaluated some ad funded mobile apps, on a device I had also used for EWTN and Radio Maria (Nederland).

Although Radio Maria (being European, but also transmitting in countries where being Christian can even cause you personal safety issues) is a lot more careful about the data it shares from apps, EWTN and its affiliates (as well as many other USA based Catholic websites) are still very much pro “American free market” values (although they often come across as naive rather than malicious, and don’t realise that web marketing can be hijacked by competitors).

The barcode apps invariably tried to deliver me “ads” to convert to some form of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity; in spite of me being perfectly happy with my liberal (and by my own confession not very devout) Catholic faith (Lady Gaga is a far better Catholic than I am), and not expecting to find the numbers of Jesus nor Satan in asset tag labels that I had myself generated in this earthly life.

it was more hilarious than offensive but I really I dread to think what young Muslims worldwide could be getting in such ads especially as I doubt that the content of Arabic llanguage content sent to a “Western” online marketing firm would be monitored as closely as it perhaps ought to be…

In England we still have the Voice newspaper (which is actually very recent from 1982); although its very London-centric. There are others in English aimed at (South) Asians but these are based in (and biased towards) the North of England, ignoring places like Slough and putting news items from London in alongside war reports from the Middle East.

British liberal media to be fair tries hard to be diverse but still ends up dominated by middle class white males from “Oxbridge” arts backgrounds (which is why its often spectacularly bad even reporting about science and technology.

In the 2000s I was turned down for work experience with the BBC for being the “wrong kind of Asian” :laugh_at:

The staff there genuinely weren’t 100% sure where Malaysia was (in spite of being based in the annex building of the Caversham international monitoring service) and wanted people who spoke Punjabi, Urdu or other South Asian languages or Chinese rather than European ones (as they can of course do double duty with the surveillance/propaganda work)

Sarfraz Manzoor, a chap around the same age as myself who did have the “right background” to become a British Asian journalist regularly complained that he got “ghettoised” to editing cricket score broadcasts and selecting bhangra records for middle aged presenters on Asian network when he in fact wanted to do work reporting on pop music (something he has only recently been able to do since the 2000s)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarfraz_Manzoor

@Shakyamuni 985728 wrote:

The internet has done wonders for alternative media.

at least until commercial interests kick in (it is not possible to view the video clip in the UK).

On the subject of diversity although I grew up in London and SE England which are diverse and supposedly cosmopolitan/multicultural areas; whenever I attended any rave folk who tried to guess my ancestry (especially hippies) assumed I was from any random place from Peru to Tibet; and even seemed a bit disappointed to realise I spoke English with a London/Essex accent and not any other exotic languages :laugh_at:.

Whereas round here locals not only immediately realise I am likely to be English by birth (due to the way I speak) but have some idea roughly where Malaysia is, – they might get the exact location mixed up with the Phillipines or Thailand but would be equally likely to get the Netherlands and Denmark mixed up.

I suspect that worldwide the nearer you get to the sea; people end becoming more diverse by necessity as there is always travel and trade at coastal areas whilst at the same time a lot of cultures are very similar; a lot of the values of traditional North European cultures are common to those of Asia (especiallly the love of music, food, drink, science and engineering and anything that can make as much noise as possible :laugh_at:). Perhaps all of this is spread by travel across the seas….