The problem, she said, is that Asian Americans have been historically misrepresented by the media. Burgos, an intern at The Dallas Morning News, is one of 16 aspiring journalists in a newspaper workshop sponsored by the Asian American Journalists Association, which is holding its convention in New York City this week. Because I wanted to know how I ought to be covering Asian Americans, I got a copy. You might think Asian Americans don't have much to complain about.
American family can boast of a musical or mathematical genius.
In fact, although a lot of Asian Americans are prosperous, some national groups suffer from high rates of poverty, unemployment and lack of education. A 1995 United Way study found that Cambodians living in Los Angeles had lower median incomes and college graduation rates and higher levels of poverty and unemployment than the city's African Americans. The news stories are either about exemplary Asian Americans like Bill Lann Lee, the first Asian American to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department, or they're about the Asian Americans who were involved in the Democrats' fund-raising scandals or alleged villains like Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist who stands accused of breaching national security by downloading nuclear weapons secrets. Most stories, he said, have failed to point out that Taiwan, where Lee was born, is an anti-Communist country, yet he's accused of spying for Communist China. Too much of the reporting has focused on that instead of on the facts of the case.