Political Participation and Use ofEthnic vs. General-Market Media.

This paper analyzes data from the Bay Area News Media Survey (2002), which posed questions about media use, language capability, ethnic and panethnic community, political participation, and other characteristics of 1,662 immigrants and native-born whites, Latinos, Chinese and Chinese Americans, and African Americans in the 7-county San Francisco Bay Area. The analysis examines relationships between media use for news—ethnic vs. general-market media—and political participation and attitudes. A central naïve assumption about the non-English ethnic media is that they tend to keep immigrants separate in their own language communities. Respected journalists have written that parts of the ethnic media constitute a “news ghetto,” even that the ethnic media as a whole constitute a “Tower of Babel” that erodes a “community of discussion” and thus undermines an assumption of democracy by preventing discussion between groups separated by language and language-based media use. Analysis of the survey data does not support these claims. The ethnic media do not constitute a “news ghetto” for most users. Most consumers of ethnic media also use the general-market (“mainstream”) media, so if there is a “community of discussion” that is accessible through the general-market media, they are not isolated from it. The central question of this paper is whether use of ethnic or general-market media is associated with more or with less political participation and with the attitudes and knowledge that support participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]