Sunny Hundal, responsible for re-vamping reporting on British Asian current affairs as editor of AsiansInMedia and web blog Pickled Politics was the chair of the event. He introduced Humera Khan, founder of An-Nisa Society and contributing editor for Q-News which have both aspired to create a new space for British Muslims to speak from. To Sunny’s left, but positioning herself in a number of places in the socio-political spectrum was Sadaf Meehan, an ex-Reporter at The Voice who will be joining The Guardian as a trainee journalist. To her right was Rajeev Syal, a senior reporter for The Times, who has worked his way around most of the nationals. Amardeep Bassey, Investigations Editor for Sunday Mercury, brought to the table his experiences of reporting in Birmingham with the exception of one month spent in a Pakistani jail on suspicion of being a spy.

Sunny Hundal

Sunny opened the debate with a few comments on how mainstream media continue to ignorantly frame Asians and all ethnic minority communities as something ‘other’ than British. His advice was to break down the barriers and stereotypes to show “there is a lot more than just crime, radicalism and Asian Rich lists. Ethnic minority communities are still only covered when there is some sort of problem in the community. They’re not really celebrated for just being Britons.”

But for him, the responsibility of re-wiring the media was also with communities themselves, championing their national identity first and foremost alongside cultural differences. He said “For the next 10-15 years I don’t think the struggle is that we should be defining ourselves differently, but we have to define ourselves as Britons with our own way of living.”

The agenda shift that he suggested was becoming media producers of meaning rather than reactive to the content and output. “Be part of the media and don’t just stand outside. We can’t just keep saying this and that needs to change. We have to understand the way the media works, look at where the problems lie, whether it’s news production, presentation or with production companies not making the right documentaries.”

Humera Khan

Humera also began by warning the audience to mind the gap between how mainstream media claims to represents “ethnic” diversity and the reality of this: “If you look at mainstream (white) British society, you have a wide variety of different opinions, ideas, histories which are reflected in the media. Minority ethnic communities also reflect a broad spectrum of experiences and attitudes but we’ve only really been allowed to be a monolith. It’s like saying ‘One of you should be enough to cover the whole of your experience.’ That’s the reason we’ve only gone as far as we’ve been allowed to go.”

But she was equally critical of so-called ‘Black media’ which emerged in the 80s after the “3 Rs; Riots, Race Relations Act and radical change that came as a result of that” to develop a creative dialogue about British centric perspective on minority experiences in this country. Instead, she stressed that it “unintentionally allowed a sort of separation from the debates about minority communities from the mainstream and also took it outside of this arena.”

As an activist, writer and Muslim, Humera also described hostility from mainstream and a left-leaning ethnic media towards her faith. She talked about the evolution of the first national magazine for British Muslim voices, which began as “The Muslim Wise, talked about the ‘Yummy 90s, and the emergence of the young upwardly mobile Muslims and later led to Q-News.”

She ended by sharing that ventures like this were (financially) independent, unlike black media that was supported by statutory funding and that there are lots of “voices on the margins which are not being supported because they don’t fit into an accepted ideological framework.”

Sadaf Meehan

The next speaker, Sadaf, shared her experiences and ethical dilemmas working as a journalist with The Voice during the Lozells riots [October 2005 – sparked by the rumour that a 14-year-old black girl had been caught shoplifting by a Pakistani shopkeeper and subsequently raped] and the irresponsible role that some ethnic press plays in debates about race. “Because I was the only Asian in the office, I was particularly self-conscious and I wasn’t comfortable writing a story without having all the evidence.”