Columbia professor speaks on South Asians in news

John Palmer Senior Editor

Columbia University journalism professor Sreenath Sreenivasan spoke on the role of South Asians in shaping and creating the American news media in a talk on Nov. 7. The lecture, which was attended by approximately 30 students, was sponsored by the South Asian Students Alliance.

“I told my parents when I was 12 that I was going to be a journalist and they started crying immediately,” Sreenivasan said at the beginning of his talk. For an Indian person, journalism was not a career that his parents expected. After all, Indians are supposed to be engineers and surgeons, right? Wrong, says Sreenavasan. South Asians could—and should—take positions everywhere in society, journalism included.

Now an ABC News correspondent in New York, Sreenivasan got his first job at a newspaper at the young age of 15. He’s been at Columbia’s School of Journalism since 1993. Most of his talk centered on the role of South Asians as active consumers of the news media.

Sreenivasan is the co-founder and former president of the South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA). SAJA’s purpose is to “work as an organization to help cover South Asia better,” he said. “Coverage of South Asia needs help in a lot of ways.”

How can students or active members of the community, make this difference? There are two basic ways, and both come from making the public better consumers of the news.
“I want to get you all thinking as better consumers of the news,” he said. “The better consumers we become of the news, the better the coverage becomes.” It is the responsibility of all consumers of all types of news—Internet, print, television—to inform these journalists of things going on in their community.

A lot of people who are minorities in the U.S. think of the media as a kind of monolithic enterprise,” said Sreenivasan.

In many cases, however, journalists are “ignorant” of traditions in these communities. “You’ve got to treat journalists as if they’re five-year-old children. You’ve got to give them constructive criticism,” he said. “Write angry letters when you’re unhappy about something…if you don’t do that, they won’t know. You’ve got to spoon feed them your side of the story until they get it.”

Sreenivasan pointed out that after Sept. 11, 2001, many of the personal stories coming from those events centered on white businessmen working in the upper floors of the towers. But there were other voices and stories that were lost in the volume of news and information streaming from U.S. news outlets during those first few days after the terrorist attacks. For example, many workers at the famous restaurant on top of the World Trade Center, Windows of the World, were Bangladeshi. Sreenivasan noted that there was “no coverage of the waiters who worked there.” If not for a number of people who were active consumers of the news, these stories would have been lost.

South Asians already hold prominent roles in a number of international news organizations. For example, Vanita Gupta is now a leading lawyer for NAACP, and Rena Golden is now the executive vice president of CNN International.

Sreenivasan’s website (sree.net) contains additional information on South Asians in the media as well as additional news on journalism.