Asian-American newspapers cover social issues, triumphs in their communities
By Alicia Benjamin-Samuels
freedomforum.org
06.18.01
One of a series of articles about ethnic newspapers — how they cover their communities, and what mainstream newspapers can learn from their approach.
Although Asian-Americans enjoy a rich history in this country, their stories often get lost or pushed aside in the mainstream press somewhere between news about blacks and whites.
"The Asian presence in the United States is both rich and mostly invisible," says William Wong, author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America.
In his book, Wong gives an example of Asians being overlooked in the media: a 1993 New York Times article about nonwhite U.S. senators that mentioned Carol Moseley-Braun, an African-American senator at the time, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Native-American senator, but said nothing about Hawaii's two senators, Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka.
Wong also mentions a 1994 Sacramento Bee article about the search for a new chancellor at the University of California at Davis that said, "There are currently no members of ethnic minorities at the helm of a UC campus."
But Chang-lin Tien was the chancellor of the Berkeley campus then and had been since 1990.
Hidden in the shadows, historically and today, are the stories of Americans whose ancestors hail from the Philippines, Asia and the South Pacific Islands.
Asians have an expansive history in America. Filipino-American history began in the late 16th century when a Spanish galleon arrived at what is now known as Morro Bay, Calif. Filipinos, known as Luzones Indios, were among the ship's crew. In 1763, some Filipino crewmembers of another Spanish galleon, while unloading cargo at a place we know today as New Orleans, jumped ship and escaped to the bayous, where they established homes.
In 1865, Chinese workers were hired to help build the Transcontinental Railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The Chinese, 80% to 90% of the railroad workforce, started the dangerous work of blasting and laying ties over the treacherous mountain terrain.
"The American people know that the Chinese people built the railroad and often that's the one and only thing they know," said University of Colorado history professor, Patricia Limerick, in "Ancestors in the Americas," a recent PBS documentary directed by Loni Ding.
From the 1870s to the 1890s, anti-Chinese sentiment grew as Chinese laborers were used as scapegoats for economic hard times. The U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which restricted immigration of Chinese, and later other Asians, into the United States. It wasn't until 1943 that the Exclusion Act was fully repealed.
In 1895, San Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark was denied re-entry into the U.S. after a visit to his parents' home in China. Federal authorities claimed he was not a U.S. citizen. Ark's 1897 U.S. Supreme Court case, Wong Kim Ark v. The United States, established the legal right of citizenship by birth for all Americans, more clearly defining the 14th Amendment.
Helping hold communities together
Asian-American newspapers played a significant role in holding people together during traumatic times like World War II when communities were scattered and confused.
In 1903, the daily Rafu Shimpo was established in Los Angeles to serve the city's Japanese residents. The paper, published initially in Japanese only, now has English and Japanese sections.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, the FBI picked up the paper's publisher, H.T. Komai, and took him to an internment camp, according to Rafu Shimpo's Web site. The paper closed the following day, but once World War II ended, Komai's son, Akira Komai, restarted the paper. It resumed publishing in January 1946. Its current circulation is 22,000.
Nichi Bei Times, a daily newspaper in San Francisco with a circulation of 8,000, is published in English and Japanese. The paper started in 1946 to reconnect the Japanese-American community after citizens emerged from the internment camps.
Today, papers like Rafu Shimpo and Nichi Bei Times continue to tell the vast and varied stories of Asians in America. Nichi Bei Times editor Kenji G. Taguma says Asian-American newspapers have a commitment to community service that many mainstream papers don't have.
"I think the ethnic press has been committed to social issues from the beginning," said Taguma, who has worked at the Nichi Bei Times for more than five years. The editor, who has a strong background in community and civil rights activism, said he sometimes works more than 100 hours a week.
In January 1998 Taguma wrote a story about what he calls a "little-known case for reparations." The article was about Japanese-American railroad workers in Nevada and other Western states who sought reparations for being fired from their jobs after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It noted that the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted a government apology and $20,000 in compensation to Japanese-Americans deprived of civil liberties during the war.
Taguma said this story received little or no attention in mainstream newspapers. From 1996 to 1998 Nichi Bei Times dedicated extra space in the paper to include letters to the editor by people expressing their concerns about redress issues.
"We covered this story probably better than anyone," said the editor, who won a New California Media Award for the story.
"Because of our community connection we can cover the stories better, many times," Taguma said. "We give time to the issues that wouldn't see the light of day in the mainstream press."
Carol Vu, a reporter with Northwest Asian Weekly in Seattle, says that newspaper's mission is to empower the Asian community. "I really like that mission statement," she said. The Northwest Asian Weekly, started 18 years ago, has a circulation of 12,000.
According to the weekly's Web site, before its publisher, Assunta Ng, founded the newspaper in 1982, immigrants "had to go to a billboard in Chinatown to find out what was going on."
Now the newspaper, along with its sister publication, the Seattle Chinese Post, a Chinese-language publication, informs its readers about community, social, political and international issues that affect them, Vu said.
Vu has written about such topics as the use of the word oriental, Filipino veterans who are seeking official recognition for their role in World War II and an upstart magazine called Colors, which covers communities of color in Seattle.
Because some Asians are offended when they are referred to as oriental, the state Legislature is considering a bill that would change all references of oriental in state law to Asian, according to Vu's March 8 article in Northwest Asian Weekly.
During World War II, more than 100,000 Filipinos volunteered for the Filipino Commonwealth Army and fought alongside the U.S. armed forces, Vu wrote in a Feb. 22 article. "Filipinos were on the front lines of the battle of Corregidor, fought at Bataan, walked in what became known as the Bataan Death March, and were held and tortured as prisoners of war," she wrote.
Her story about Colors magazine discusses efforts by its African-American publisher, Robert Jeffrey, to tell both the painful and successful stories of people of color. Jeffrey's wife, Minty, who is Native American, African-American and Irish, said the magazine's motto is "Celebrating our similarities and understanding our differences."
Asian-Americans in Seattle aren't covered enough in mainstream papers, Vu said. "There are many successful (Asian) entrepreneurs ... who are making great strides in the Asian community," she said. "You don't see their faces in the mainstream papers."
But Northwest Asian Weekly is dedicated to giving those and other Asians more visibility in the media, she said. "We'll get right on it. If there's a success story, we'd love to cover it."
Greater depth
Neela Banerjee, a reporter for AsianWeek in San Francisco, says that because ethnic newspapers are based in the communities they serve and the writers are usually more connected to those communities, they can more thoroughly cover their target audiences.
"We're able to see it from the inside," said Banerjee, who has worked for AsianWeek for eight months. AsianWeek, a 20-year-old weekly newspaper, has a circulation of 40,000.
Mainstream stories about Asian-Americans are usually less in-depth than those that appear in ethnic newspapers, Banerjee said. She said at AsianWeek reporters follow a story for a longer time than mainstream journalists. "Mainstream newspapers don't usually have a good grasp of the social issues that affect Asian-Americans," she said.
Recently, Banerjee has written AsianWeek articles about hate crimes against Asians at the University of California at Davis; a culturally diverse Bay Area neighborhood struggling to live peacefully and sex trafficking in a Filipino-American community.
In a Feb. 16 article, Banerjee wrote about hundreds of University of California students who called for stronger university support for South Pacific Island students who were victims of several hate crimes.
In her April story about the Bay Area's Richmond district and its diverse population, Banerjee told how the groups in the area sometimes come together and sometimes clash. "Asians and blacks don't like to hang out with each other," said 16-year-old Thomas Fu in the piece. "They don't like each other. ... They don't really talk."
A Feb. 23 story by Banerjee focused on protesters who called for the prosecution of a Berkeley, Calif., landlord accused of trafficking in Filipino girls. Banerjee said she was the only reporter at the demonstration. "Mainstream news organizations don't think that's important, but we can go in there and give these people a voice."
The AsianWeek reporter said she especially enjoyed working for a pan-Asian newspaper. "Every issue we tackle enforces how much we have in common and how much we need to work together," Banerjee said. "We can be the voice of the community and a place where issues can be discussed in a deeper way."
Avoiding 'mainstream'
Taguma, who is Japanese-American, said he had never worked for a mainstream newspaper and had "no desire to." He said working for the Nichi Bei Times allows him to cover community topics and expose issues that are ignored by the mainstream press.
Vu, who also has never worked for a mainstream newspaper, said she prefers to work for an ethnic newspaper because she's concerned about the Asian-American community and prefers to cover community news.
"I like being a voice for those who might not necessarily have a strong voice in the mainstream press," she said.
Vu, who is Vietnamese-American, said she also wouldn't feel comfortable working for a larger organization where she doesn't know anyone. She likes working with the small news staff at Northwest Asian Weekly. "I work with a team on a consistent basis and I know I can depend on these people every day," she said.
Some ethnic journalists, including Asian-Americans, have written about negative experiences they've had at mainstream newspapers. While some news organizations reach out to journalists of color, they have not always fostered the best environment for those reporters.
Esther Wu, a fourth-generation Chinese-American and columnist for the Dallas Morning News, said she was fired when she told editors at the San Antonio Express-News in 1976 that she was embarrassed when they ran a caricature of her with buckteeth, dressed as a kamikaze pilot, to illustrate a story she had written about learning to fly a plane.
At the time, all of the editors at the paper were white men and she was the only Asian on staff, Wu said.
An incident at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in April in Washington, D.C., proved that "newsrooms have a long way to go on the diversity front," AsianWeek reporter Ethen Lieser wrote in a May 31 article.
During the convention, a comedy troupe performed a skit on U.S.-China diplomacy. Pretending to speak through an interpreter, a white male actor, playing a Chinese official babbled, "Ching ching chong chong" as he gestured wildly with his hands.
"What was disturbing was not just the fact that this was happening, but that hundreds of editors, my future bosses, were laughing," said Amy Leang, a student journalist from Ball State University who covered the convention for the ASNE Reporter.
Leang said she was humiliated by the experience. "Many newsrooms talk the 'diversity' talk but certainly do not walk the 'diversity' walk," she wrote in an April 6 ASNE Reporter article.
Mainstream newspapers should use ethnic newspapers as sources because those papers cover the issues that matter most to those communities, Leang said in the article.
Reporters interviewed for this story talked about what mainstream newspapers could do to cover Asian-American communities better:
Banerjee, whose parents grew up in India, worked for five months at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and said switching from a mainstream newspaper to an ethnic paper was fulfilling. "Only once in a while did I get to cover Asian-American or ethnic stories at the Daily News, but here I can do it every day."