October 5, 2016 | No Comments
Asian American groups and reporters are crying foul at Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters for a recent segment in which he visited Manhattan’s Chinatown.
In the segment, which aired Monday night during “The O’Reilly Factor,” Watters went to Chinatown and asked people on the street questions about everything from who they are voting for, to whether they knew Karate and whether the watches one man was selling were “hot.”
But criticism of the segment began to mount steadily, and by Tuesday night the piece was picked up and slammed in outlets like Vox, Esquire and GQ. Many Asian-American journalists reacted with disgust on Twitter, and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund tweeted, “Seriously, can this @FoxNews @oreillyfactor piece with interviews in NY #Chinatown be any more racist?”
The Asian American Journalists Association issued statement calling the segment “rude, offensive, mocking, derogatory and damaging.” Bill O’Reilly called the segment “gentle fun,” but even he seemed to predict trouble, noting on air after the segment that he expected a lot of letters.
“It’s 2016. We should be far beyond tired, racist stereotypes and targeting an ethnic group for humiliation and objectification on the basis of their race. Sadly, Fox News proves it has a long way to go in reporting on communities of color in a respectful and fair manner,” Paul Cheung, AAJA President said in a statement demanding an apology from Fox News. “Fox missed a real opportunity to investigate the Asian American vote, a topic not often covered in mainstream news.”
This is far from Watters’ first foray into questionable territory with his ambush interviews and man-on-the-street segments. Watters has done segments on everything from gay pride parades, to racism (he visited Harlem in a similarly constructed segment that also drew severe criticism), to a piece about homeless people. But to many in the media business he is most famous for following a reporter around for hours to get an ambush interview, according to Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel.
A Fox News spokesperson did not have a direct response to the statements from the Asian American groups, instead pointing to and interview Watters did earlier this year where he said that he “doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings” and just wants to “listen to them and have them share with me their thoughts and opinions in a way that doesn’t come across as mean.”