Archives: Media Ownership

The National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium recently released a report (PDF) entitled, “Asian Pacific Americans in Prime Time: Lights, Camera and Little Action,” which evaluated the “type, quality, and complexity of characters portrayed by Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) actors during the fall 2004 television season,” and which found that the number of regular APIA actors that appear on prime time programming amount to less than half of the APIA population percentage.  The study was commissioned in order to flesh out the annual report card on the four major television networks (evaluating progress in improving the number of APIA actors, writers, directors, development contracts, executives and procurement from APIA-owned companies) which has been released for the past five years by the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition (APAMC).

Among the key findings of the study were the following:

• Only 13 of 113 prime time programs featured at least one APIA actor.
• Only three programs include more than one APIA actor among their regular cast.
• Even in San Francisco, Honolulu, and Queens, NY – where there are large APIA populations – APIA actors are absent or underrepresented.

Studies have shown that representations of people of color and women on television have a tremendous impact on how Americans shape their perceptions of racial groups and populations.  The lack of APIA representations in prime time programming makes it more difficult for our society to form accurate and thorough views of a significant portion of our population.

To learn more about how media ownership and media concentration contribute to a lack of diversity and localism in programming, see What’s At Stake.