Anyone who remembers the Ford motor company corporate and advertising fiasco of 1997 and the furore that followed in the UK when their advertising agents whitened the face of a black employee in their campaigns, will read this book with more than a little interest as it is about the representation of race in the media. Concerned with the way that the media represents diversity to all its audiences at local, national and global level, through documentary, news, current affairs or advertisements, the book attempts to contextualise the factors and contradictions which surround corporate communication responsibility and accountability. If you have to buy one book on race, this could be it.
The author acknowledges tensions between theory and practice and does not attempt to offer a checklist of characteristics which so often becomes dogma. Ferguson offers “a bridge between text whose role is to introduce ideas in debates and the act of engaging in primarily textual research and writing about issues of race and the media”. He does this by giving us theories of ideology, questioning current research and focusing on otherness, euro‐centralism and paradigms for the future in an international perspective.
If you don’t know the jargon, it does not matter. This is a comfortable read even though it is a challenging text psychologically and emotionally. Popular case studies include the US Oprah Winfrey show. They are assessed without loss of reliability. He also looks at how newspapers such as the UK’s Daily Mail “unashameably structures normality around royalism” (p. 171) and discusses the fragile concept of normality competently and objectively.
Well‐known British historians are mentioned such as Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm and others but there is no rigid sociological paradigm for future research. Ferguson believes that the work being done on audience research by academics from media and communication arts will prove more appropriate and more useful.
