Browning, P. R., Shafer, H., Rogers, J., and DeFever, R. (2003). News Ghettos, Threats to Democracy, and Other Myths About Ethnic Media: Lessons from the Bay Area News Media Survey. San Francisco: San Francisco State University. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from the Ethnic Media Final Report (Document 103003).

In a report funded by the Media, Arts, and Culture Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program Ford Foundation called News Ghettos, Threats to Democracy, and Other Myths About Ethnic Media, the findings of a Bay Area news media survey are evaluated. The 2002 survey conducted multilingual interviews to determine the effects of ethnic media usage on its audience. Survey administrators interviewed 1,662 African Americans, Chinese,Chinese Americans,Latinos and whites via telephone. The authors state that their goals regarding their study included, “the understanding of the conditions in which immigrants and their U.S. born descendants turn to ethnic media or general media for news.” Essentially they looked into the media use of both ethnic and mainstream media. 

            The researchers explain that a person’s English proficiency has a direct affect of their usage of ethnic media. For example, non-English speaking people who come to the U.S. when they are in their middle age or older are less likely to adopt English, which encourage them to turn to ethnic media. The study found that most immigrants who come to America with knowledge of the English language, such as Chinese, tend to turn to both ethnic and mainstream media.

             The lessons from the survey further reveal that immigrants trust ethnic media as well as the mainstream media. However,when it comes to news about their home country they are more likely to trust ethnic media.Especially with regards to international media, researchers have found that Chinese people tend to trust ethnic media over mainstream media. Unlike the Chinese, Latinos are more inclined to trust the mainstream media. This idea of trusting the media is especially evident in the African American community. However, researchers indicated that African Americans use ethnic media at a substantially lower rate than Latinos and Chinese. Also, African Americans trust the mainstream media less when they have higher levels of education. Uneducated African American tend to trust the general media the most, according to the study.

            From this survey researchers concluded that ethnic media’s readership declines with each generation, and their examples indicate that both Chinese and Latino immigrants become less likely to rely on ethnic media as their stay in America becomes longer. This all goes back to the comfort of a native language. If people are becoming assimilated to the American culture, than their comfort with English improves and so does their use of mainstream media. Most immigrants only rely temporally on ethnic news as their only source. In addition, researchers state that no matter how comfortable immigrants become with mainstream media they do not supplement ethnic media, they simply complement them.

            While examining the differences between newspapers and television, researchers concluded that there is a low rate of everyday newspaper reading compared to television. African Americans were described as being disconnected from the “mainstream” of news as it appears in the general-market newspapers, because of their use of general media such as radio rather than newspapers. Television on the other hand seems to be a popular news outlet for Chinese and Latinos. It is to be noted, that the survey suggested that Latino television and radio outlets have a larger audience because of the higher rate of Latino illiteracy. The Chinese, unlike Latinos, have a large number of Chinese newspapers and magazines. Those Chinese publications are also unique because their profits do not come from display ads but from subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds.

This research was conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area and hence limits the findings to just that region. However, the authors provide a great deal of observations with regards to Latinos, Chinese, and African Americans. The findings seem to lead to the conclusion that ethnic media strengthen the public forum by protecting their readers from being sterotyped and sometimes even from being wrongfully persecuted. Ethnic media do not seem to hinder patriotic sentiments, instead they appear to help many of their readers to get involved in American politics by fighting for the rights of all Americans.(reviewed by Catherine Sobolewski)