The Role of Ethnic Media and Ways to Report on Minorities
17 07 2007
Summary of presentation by Andrew Lam at Balkan Investigative Reporting Network

Overall media picture in the US

It is very difficult to frame the picture of the US media because we’re in a period of great turmoil. We have cable, DSL, bloggesphere, major, alternative, youth, and ethnic media, just to name a few. More fragmentation is sure to happen as more individuals have the power to be broadcasters and reporters and entertainers than ever before. We’re also in the age of citizen reporters- people who have a mobile phone and tape and take pictures and film events and break news before any professional journalist can arrive to the scene.

Major news organisations are losing viewers/listeners/readers while small news providers sometime discover that they can reach far wider audiences than they ever dreamed before. The mainstream press is shrinking and many are putting their resources on-line. This is where it’s still dynamic and vibrant.

Ethnic Media: Development and Importance

Ethnic media, however, are growing and there’s still room to grow as the US demographic shift is changing very quickly, toward more a pluralistic society. In California, one out of 4 persons is an immigrant and 40 % of California households speak a language other than English. Our news organization has a directory of ethnic media and so far we identified more than 2500 news outlets that serve ethnic communities in the US. We think the real number may be more than double of what we chronicled.

When we did a poll as to how many American adults access ethnic media, the results were astounding: 51 million American adults access one form of ethnic media or another. That’s about one sixth of the general population. Half of them use ethnic media as their primary source of information.
It is estimated that by the year 2050, the white population in the US will be under the 50% mark. This means that there’ll no longer be a majority. It also means that we should all prepare ourselves to find good viable models for our very pluralistic society.

Ethnic and Mainstream media: A Comparison

Often enough, the general stereotype is ethnic media is that they are poor and lacking in resources. Also, it is often thought that they don’t play a very active role but translate mainstream news into their various languages.
While some of that is true, what many don’t know is how crucial ethnic media is for their community. For instance, when Hurricane Katrina left hundreds dead in Louisiana and Missippi and almost a million homeless, ethnic media played an absolutely important role.

There were more than 100,000 Vietnamese in that region and when they evacuated, they didn’t listen to English-language radio but to Vietnamese-language radio. They were warned not to go to the astrodome (football stadium) where many Americans took shelter.

Stories of rapes and murders were being reported from the stadium. The radio station told their Vietnamese listeners to go to Houston where a large Vietnamese population was mobilized to come out and help their compatriots. In other words, these folks relied on their own media as first responders and as organizer during the catastrophe. All in all, they fared better than those who didn’t have access to ethnic media.

Another case in point: Hispanic language radio programmes are the favorite mode of media that the Hispanic population prefer. But they do not just inform their listeners. Last year, they were at the forefront of the immigration rights movements. They told their listeners to go out and march for their rights and demand fair treatment from the US government. A couple of millions took to the street, spurred by their radio disc jockeys as well as by activist

It is true that ethnic media tend to go beyond objectivity in their practice of journalism. On the other hand, they serve a very specific group whose rights often are ignored in the larger society.

Models of cooperation – between mainstream and ethnic media and the ethnic media themselves

Over the last few years we have been encouraged by more collaboration between ethnic media groups, as well as between ethnic and mainstream media groups. For instance, Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese language newspaper in the US, based in Los Angeles, sent a reporter to work with a paper in Florida – Sun Sentinel. Together they went to interview many Vietnamese owned nail salons (Vietnamese own more than 40% of nail salon industry in the US) to do stories together. They share byline in both papers. The Vietnamese reporter benefited from working with a professional journalist. The professional journalist gained access to a community that he otherwise wouldn’t have.

Another example: India West, a magazine for Indians in Silicon Valley, sent their reporter to India with a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle to cover the devastation of the tsunami. The Chronicle didn’t have access but they paid for the reporter from India West to go to India. In essence, instead of competing, the two media groups gained front row stories by working together.

In terms of intra-ethnic media, what NAM does is send the various profiled stories to our subscribers and they are free to pick and choose the stories from the ethnic media. We are beginning to see black papers running point of views from Chinese writers. And we see Chinese papers running stories about black youth. This is the horizontal communication that we want to encourage.

Ways of overcoming bad journalistic practices of mainstream media in their reporting of minorities, such as the use of stereotypes and the employment of incorrect assumptions or offensive terms

Often enough, we hear from mainstream papers’ editors that they can’t do stories about ethnic communities because these communities are too difficult to access. What we tell them is that these communities are very much part of the society at large and it is bad journalism to ignore a whole swath of population groups. We tell them to hire more minority journalists, increase diversity in the newsroom, so that it wouldn’t be difficult to do the necessary stories, more in depth and less superficial.

The other thing we do is provide scientific polls. These polls can be very expensive to do but they are guaranteed to generate dialogue. Polls and statistical data provide journalists something far more than anecdotal evidence and also give them ideas as to how to deepen their coverage of ethnic communities.