The Friday morning session of the 25th Annual Conference of Circom Regional kicked off with a plenary session on the challenges of globalisation to regional television, in which participated Josu Amezaga (University of the Basque Country), Tahir Abbas (University of Birmingham), Scott Rensberger (American International Broadcaster) and Luis Rivas (director News & Programmes of Euronews). The session was conducted by Anita Bhalla, president of Circom Regional.

The paper presented by Josu Amezaga and Edorta Arana, professors at the University of the Basque Country, on the new linguistic situation emerging in Europe gave rise to an intense debate. Europe hosts about 60 minority languages, spoken by about 50 million people. More than 56 million immigrants living in Europe have access to television through satellite. From a technical viewpoint, 9 of 10 people can access television in their own language. Nevertheless, English keeps on being the dominating language. Television by satellite reminds us the linguistic minorities. Amezaga focused on the Basque case. He concluded a “geolinguistic region” has been created.

Dr. Tahir Abbas, from the University of Birmingham, invited the participants to think about how we react in view of the Muslim community. According to him, in the globalization era, public media groups offer a very vague idea of the Arab world, specially after 11-S and 11-M, and promotes a stereotypical viewpoint. Tahir called to eliminate the idea of radicalism usually linked to this community and to offer an adequate context.

Scott Rensberger said mass media should serve society and their main objective shouldn’t be the making of money. In the US, about 52 percent thinks that news will become worse in the future. Rensberger also criticized the use of dubbing in news programmes and other programmes, as subtitling brings the television viewer in touch with the minority language.

Luis Rivas, director of Euronews, explained the functioning of Euronews, which makes use of regional news and world news. He agreed with Tahir that we all have stereotypes, but we should go beyond. According to Rivas, it’s important that we all have a European vision, but there is no European television channel in Europe...