(IN)DEPENDENCY ON THE HEGEMONIC TO BE HEARD: NEWS-FOCUSED WECHAT OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS IN AUSTRALIA AS A CASE STUDY

Resumen

This paper contextualizes an alternative perspective to a common academic discourse that ethnic media in the West provide a voice for the marginalized from the original bourgeois public sphere. The paper investigates an emergent industry – news-focused WeChat Official Accounts (hereafter WOAs) in Australia. The WOA is an information broadcasting feature launched on WeChat in August 2013 and then adopted by Australian-Chinese media entrepreneurs to produce and circulate the ethno-specific news stories among the Chinese diaspora in Australia and even beyond. From 2019 to 2020, I interviewed 24 media professionals to understand the internal working of news-focused WOAs in Australia. I argue that the anatomy of these Chinese-language digital media organizations reveals their financial independence from the nation-state in contrast to Australian hegemonic taxpayer-sponsored media. Contrary to many media scholars have argued, news-focused WOAs do not completely represent antithetical voices to Australian English media. The commercial imperative does not translate well into agonistic pluralism. News-focused WOAs are attached to the hegemonic journalism and internalize interethnic racism alongside white supremacist discourse against black people in order to be part of the dominant media structure.