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An “incredible number of Latinos and Asians:” Media representations of racial and ethnic population change in Atlanta, Georgia

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Abstract

The United States has experienced substantial population change in recent decades. Important trends during the 1990s include the strong growth of Latinos and Asians, and their increasing geographical dispersion throughout the country. Most individuals were likely to learn about these and other demographic shifts from mainstream media coverage of Census 2000 results. This study considers how journalists in Atlanta, Georgia, a non-traditional destination for Latinos and Asians, conveyed a simultaneous and significant increase of Whites, African Americans, Latinos and Asians in one Atlanta-area county. Analyses of 70 Atlanta Journal-Constitution articles published between 2000 and 2003 reveal that reporters were unlikely to provide comprehensive or balanced coverage about local racial/ethnic change. Instead, journalists provided far more statistics about Latinos and Asians than either Whites or Blacks and linked non-White population growth with negative issues. These practices suggest how members of the media continue to participate in discourses that sustain and disguise the racialized hierarchy in the United States.

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Notes

  1. Many of these places are not technically “new” destinations, as Mexican and/or Chinese migrants worked in agriculture, railroads or heavy manufacturing in these areas in earlier decades (for example, García, 1996; Kwong, 2002).

  2. The terms Latino and Hispanic are used interchangeably in this article to refer to men and women of Hispanic origin, regardless of race. All references to Asians, Whites and Blacks/African-Americans in this article are to those who are not Hispanic. Another race group, American/Indian or Alaskan natives, comprised a tiny fraction of Atlanta's population in 2000 and were absent from local news reporting of racial/ethnic demographic change.

  3. The smaller per cent change of Whites is because of the group's much larger population base in 1990.

  4. The U.S. Census Bureau offers specialized services for journalists, including briefings about census data, news releases, facts and photos to use in news stories: www.census.gov/pubinfo/www/news/index.html.

  5. McCombs (2004) provides a detailed review of agenda-setting studies.

  6. Others have used Latino demographics to categorize both United States and foreign-born Latinos as constituting a “challenge” to American Society (Huntington, 2004).

  7. Padín (2005) is an exception; his study examined representations of Latinos as social assets or liabilities in a Portland, Oregon newspaper.

  8. Exceptions include Bohon and Parrott (2010), Ellis and Wright (1998), Gutiérrez (2008) and Zuberi (2001).

  9. See Entman (1993), Pan and Kosicki (1993), Scheufele (1999) and Chong and Druckman (2007) for more information about the origins, mechanisms of frames and framing, and recent research using this approach.

  10. Popular press images that stereotypically depict Asians as a successful model minority can encourage a perceived threat of competition and anti-Asian attitudes (Tuan, 1998; Osajima, 2000; Kim, 2007b).

  11. Other studies address similar themes without specifically analyzing representations of Latino population increases. For instance, Weill and Castañeda (2004) analyzed the response of Black newspaper editors to Latino population growth. To date, no published work has investigated US media coverage about recent Asian population dynamics.

  12. By 2000, Gwinnett county was 72.7 per cent non-Hispanic White, 13.3 per cent Black, 10.9 per cent Latino and 7.2 per cent Asian.

  13. Multiple keyword searches were conducted to locate articles that included terms like African-American but not Black and vice versa. Articles that referred to Census 2000 results solely as supplementary material and not in the main body of the article also were excluded. Editorials and letters to the editor were excluded; newspaper staff and the reading public do not consider them to be unbiased journalistic reporting (Fowler, 1991).

  14. The remaining 15 articles may have included statistics about the total population of Gwinnett county or Atlanta, but did not provide specific quantitative information about any racial/ethnic group. This distinction is made in Columns 1 and 2 of Tables 1 and 2.

  15. This figure adds all rows pertaining to Latinos in the first column of Table 1: the rows for “African-Americans, Asians, Latinos and Whites” (21.4 per cent), “African-Americans, Asians and Latinos” (5.7 per cent), “Asians and Latinos” (24.3 per cent) and “Latinos only” (20.0 per cent).

  16. Nationwide negative response following the announcement led to a reinstatement of the library's Spanish-language budget (Bardales, 2006).

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Tanya Golash-Boza, Adriana Katzew, G. Cristina Mora, Suzanne Oboler, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Rogelio Saenz and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts. Earlier versions of the article were presented at the 2008 American Seminar at Hall center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas, the 2009 “Latino/as and the Media” conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY and the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

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McConnell, E. An “incredible number of Latinos and Asians:” Media representations of racial and ethnic population change in Atlanta, Georgia. Lat Stud 9, 177–197 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2011.17

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