EthnicMajority

Despite AZN’s demise and iaTV’s (formerly ImaginAsian TV) moves to broaden its audience, operators and programmers remain confident there is a real demand for networks targeting Asian-Americans, especially those offering foreign-language content.

English-language networks aimed at the children and grandchildren of immigrants are “nice-to-have channels,” but it’s the “in-language channels that have the most value,” said Rob Thun, senior vice president of programming for AT&T’s U-Verse TV, an AZN affiliate.

While Comcast-owned AZN, which targeted Asians born or raised in the U.S., reported 13.9 million subscribers, most of the current crop of Asian-language channels count viewership in the tens and hundreds of thousands. But viewer loyalty is high.

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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – A black professor at Columbia University tells Soledad O’Brien that he instructs his 11-year-old son to fear the police.

“When you are stopped, whether you have done something or not, you cower. I want you to cower because I want you to live,” he says.

The CNN special-projects anchor says black parents from all social and economic classes told her the same thing.

“It was stunning and disturbing,” she said in an interview last week. “What is the impact of that on the psyche of these young children? What does it say about our society?

“And what’s interesting to me about that is white people do not have those conversations with their children, but every black person does,” she adds. “And the gap between those two things is where our story lies. What is happening in America? Why is that difference there?”

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Princess Tiana represents Disney’s first African American Princess. It was originally to be set in 1920s New Orleans and depicted a black maid named Maddy.

With the help of Maddy’s voodoo practicing fairy godmother, she would win the affection of a white prince after being rescued from another voodoo practictioner.This original story was allegedly sacked after criticism and complaints of racism and Maddy has now become Tiana, reports the Daily Voice. The movie’s title also reportedly changed, from The Frog Princess, the title of a classic fairytale, to the current The Princess and The Frog.

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In February 2008 the average Hispanic-American over the age of 11 spent more time online than watching television, according to the Terra Networks-sponsored “Hispanic Syndicated Study,” conducted by comScore Media Metrix.

“In general, online Hispanics—independent of their language preferences and acculturation levels—are heavily engaged in technology,” wrote the report’s authors.

Every day, more than half (56%) of Hispanic-Americans surveyed said they spent at least an hour online, which was slightly more than the 50% who spent an hour or more watching TV.

On a weekly basis, Terra reported that more Hispanic-American Internet users spent 13 or more hours online (30%) than watched TV for the same amount of time (23%).

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The good news for many of the agencies that came under the gaze of the New York City Commission on Human Rights is that they met their goals for minority hiring in 2007. The bad news is critics are likely to be unimpressed.

For one, the goals were set by the agencies themselves. Second, some of them — most notably a handful of Omnicom shops — failed to meet even those goals. But perhaps more important, a closer look at the numbers shows African-Americans and Hispanics lag behind Asian-Americans and that agencies seem to lose minority hires as fast as they hire them. Following a two-year investigation by the CCHR, 15 advertising agencies in 2007 pledged to meet goals for minority hiring, presented as a percentage of total hires for the year. The goals will be monitored for three years, and agencies that don’t meet them will be subject to penalties.

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The appearance of Chinese actors and filmmakers in Hollywood film and television has been problematic since the first films appeared in the early 1900s. Arthur Dong’s “Hollywood Chinese” documentary, screening as part of the 11th annual Hawaii International Film Festival Spring Showcase, retraces the struggle that has gone on for 100 years, with no sign of abating anytime soon.

For those new to the controversies, Dong’s work neatly captures the “progress” of Asian-Americans on screen through the decades, depicting the ways that each baby step forward is often accompanied by a leap backward.

The dilemma of the Chinese in film closely mirrors that of the Chinese-American and Asian-American experience in daily life as a minority presence, marked by one stereotype after another.

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LOS ANGELES — A Hispanic woman who won the Miss California USA contest only to have her crown yanked days later sued the pageant Thursday for half a million dollars, alleging rigging and racial bias.The pageant director rejected the claims, saying winners during his tenure have been some of the pageant’s most racially diverse ever.

Christina Silva, 24, was crowned Miss California USA on Nov. 25. Three days later, the pageant’s executive director, Keith Lewis, told her “there has been a mistake and you are not the winner,” according to the lawsuit filed in Superior Court.

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Sorry, J.Lo, A-Rod and all you other Latino A-listers. The second American Latino TV Awards won’t be honoring you this year.

Instead, this alternative award takes an offbeat approach to doling out accolades by focusing on underground talents who have yet to explode in the mainstream.

“We want to recognize people who are not normally recognized – good people doing good things who, like us to some degree, are toiling away in obscurity,” says Robert Rose, executive producer for the American Latino TV Awards.

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A government report on broadcast media ownership released Friday concludes that television stations broadcasting in specific markets tend to offer more local news for those areas than the national networks.

“With cable and satellite service, the public can receive programming from nationwide outlets, such as CNN and FOX News, and television stations in adjacent markets,” concludes the Government and Accountability Office’s (GAO) new study. “However, media outlets located in a market are more likely to provide local news, public affairs, and political programming addressing the needs of residents in that market, such as coverage of local political campaigns, compared to nationwide and adjacent-market outlets.”

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The historic presidential campaigns of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have injected issues of race and gender into politics as never before. With campaign coverage center stage on the cable channels, producers and critics are again assessing the diversity among pundits, who talk at length about things like Obama’s pastor, the Hispanic vote, Iraq and the economy.

MSNBC and CNN this election season have given new prominence to a handful of contributing commentators from varied backgrounds and perspectives: blacks, Hispanics and women. Whether such moves signal real progress in diversifying the pundit lineup or merely reflect the needs of a particular news cycle is the question, some media experts say.

The most prominent positions on television remain overwhelmingly with white male viewers, and some critics note how striking that non-inclusion can seem during this election year.

“Whatever progress has been made with contributors and commentators as of late, the cable networks have a long way to go before they look like the American people,” said Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group. He added that white men were the hosts of all the major Sunday- morning talk shows, the major primetime cable news programs and — except for Katie Couric, a relative newcomer — the network evening news broadcasts.

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