Brady Collins examines how local media frames ethnic neighborhoods in new Urban Affairs Review manuscript

Dr. Collins examines how the Los Angeles Times has framed Koreatown in the last 40 years

Dr. Collins recently published his manuscript Putting Culture on the Map: Media Discourse and the Urban Growth Machine in Koreatown, Los Angeles. This manuscript appears in the Urban Affairs Review. Urban Affairs Review has been a leading scholarly journal focused on urban politics, policy, and governance for fifty years and is affiliated with the American Political Science Association’s section on Urban Politics.

In this article, Dr. Collins examines the Los Angeles Times between 1979 and 2016 to discover how the newspaper covers Koreatown. From 1979 to the present, he found that the Los Angeles Times covered Koreatown as one of four frames: immigrant enclave, global village, divided slum, and exotic destination.

Dr. Collins uses detailed analysis from his forty year investigation of the Times to discover how the media commodifies ethnic neighborhoods and is granted power and easy in doing so.

Dr. Collins’ article is one of the few published that examines how local media describes ethnic communities. He continues working as a policy advocate in the housing and labor movement in Los Angeles. Currently, Dr. Collins serves as the Director of our MPA program.

Check out his article here.