Blog Post 3: News Coverage, Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today

Posted on August 27, 2018 by by | Leave a comment
  1. In Paul Niwa’s article “News Coverage”, he argues about how Asian Americans representation is lacking in news media. This lack of representation is due to the fact that there are very little Asian Americans working at the top of media businesses. Non-Asian news-media supervisors are far less likely to report on Asian American communities compared to Asian news supervisors. For big news media businesses to hire more Asian American workers would alleviate this issue but there are still some faults that come with hiring more Asian Americans.
  2. Paul Niwa uses statistics on Asian American news to exemplify how Asian Americans are underrepresented. “A study of Asian American neighborhood coverage in metropolitan daily newspapers found that only .3 percent of articles published by the Boston Globe in 2006 contained the word “Chinatown”” (663). Even though Boston’s Chinatown has a large and dense population with a high percentage of it’s residents living in poverty, the Chinatown still makes little to no news coverage. Sometimes when Asian Americans do make it on the news, they are portrayed in a bad light. “CNN and other news organizations went to Korean American Churches” after a tragic mass murder done by a Korean man and ” [asked] people for their reaction to the attack” (665). All the people interviewed were apologetic for the murderers crimes, giving a bad image for all Korean Americans.
  3. A keyterm Paul Niwa introduces is the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA). To improve news coverage on ethnic minorities, organizations such as this can help news managers to “find qualified Asian American employees” (666). Organizations like this also help to improve the skills of Asian Americans by “[organizing] dozens of workshops at its national convention on writing, editing, and multimedia skills” (666).
  4. A tragic event currently happening in the world is Hurricane Hector passing over islands in Hawaii. Residents of the island have been recommended to take shelter for the next two weeks as the hurricane passes. Outside of the Asian American community, this hurricane has made very little news coverage to the rest of the world.
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