Asian Americans in Media - What You Don't Know
Asian Americans in Media: "You Can’t Extricate
the Humanity of Yourself From the Journalist"
by Rebecca Sun
April 15, 2021, 6:00am
PDT
"My
producer said, 'There's been a shooting,' and I was relaying information to the
activist [I was interviewing] in real-time," the anchor tells The Hollywood Reporter. "There was a silence on
the other line, and then I heard her start to cry."
Over
the next few days, Quijano had panels to moderate and interviews to conduct and
a nightly political news show, Red and Blue, to
anchor, leaving her little opportunity to process for herself the killing spree
that left eight people dead, six of them Asian women. "I was numb. I'm
tired on so many levels because it's a lot to confront," she says.
"There was no time to reflect on this in a detached way."
Similarly,
the morning after the shootings, NBC News correspondent Vicky Nguyen had to do
a preplanned Today segment on summer
vacation and travel. "I couldn't get my mind right," she says of
trying to get into the "positive and upbeat" Today show spirit while still reeling from the
carnage the night before. "That was the nadir for me. But since then,
thanks to essentially crying it out after that, I went back into work mode, and
that's how I've been coping with it."
Over
the past year, Asian American journalists have been doing their jobs amid a
mounting wave of physical and verbal attacks on Asians across the country (up 145 percent in 2020 in
16 of the top cities in the U.S., according to California State University San Bernardino's
Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism), exacerbated by former President
Trump's insistence on blaming China for the pandemic and referring to COVID-19
with racist terms, including "Wuhan virus" and "kung flu."
With few outlets having committed long-term resources to reporting on the Asian
American community, coverage of violent incidents felt sporadic and scattered
to many among the affected population, and often driven by Asian Americans in
the newsroom who were warning of a larger story unfolding in real time and
watching it barrel toward an unthinkable, inevitable culmination.
"[The
shootings] capped a year of racialized attacks, many of which went
unreported," says Nightline anchor
Juju Chang, who, like many if not most or all Asian Americans, is no stranger
to being the target of racial slurs; she was the victim of one such incident
last summer. "I didn't report it; I did what everyone who grows up in this
country feeling somewhat othered does, which is swallow it and keep going. That
has been the silent pain of Asian Americans for so long. This last year there
were so many other pressing events going on: a worldwide pandemic, an election,
a giant racial reckoning."
After
ABC News aired its hourlong 20/20 special
"Murder in Atlanta" on March 19, Chang says many non-Asian friends
told her they had had no idea about the year's worth of context surrounding the
Atlanta shootings. "That to me speaks to the relative invisibility of
Asian Americans, and why this is such an important moment," she adds.
Newsrooms
caught off guard
Immediately
after the Asian American Journalists Association issued media guidance on covering the
Atlanta shootings, the nonprofit's website crashed (the last time
that happened was nearly a decade ago when it released a response to a 2012
"Chink in the Armor" headline on an ESPN.com story about Jeremy Lin). That, too, spoke
to the relative invisibility of Asian Americans — that newsrooms around the
country would still find themselves so unprepared to cover a major national
story about the community.
"They're not ready,
overwhelmingly," says ESPN commentator Pablo Torre. "If media
organizations are taking the time to think of AAJA, they are at least taking
the time to locate an Asian American perspective. It’s such a low bar. But that
alone does feel like progress in our longstanding struggle to merely be
included in a conversation about race."
The guidance included straightforward tips on the proper formatting of the Korean and Chinese
victims' names (initial stories simply replicated coroners' reports, which inaccurately
abbreviated as middle initials the second word in the women's personal names),
plus a video of two AAJA members demonstrating how to pronounce them correctly. But the advisory also
contained more nuanced guidance about the intersection of racism and sexism in
violence against Asian women, in direct contrast to Cherokee County Sheriff's
Office Capt. Jay Baker's credulous parroting of the shooter's claim that his
actions were prompted by so-called sex addiction and were "not racially
motivated."
"When
newsrooms rushed to quote that,
it made it clear to us that there were not enough AAPIs [Asian American Pacific
Islanders] in leadership or people who are well-versed in the histories and
experiences of AAPIs to take a step back and ask, 'Wait, why does he get to
decide?'" says AAJA president Michelle Ye Hee Lee (who also is a national
reporter for The Washington Post).
"Growing up, there were many times
where my dad's car was vandalized and I would have to translate and fill out
the police report for my parents," adds CNN anchor Amara Walker, who is
Korean American. "I remember the flippant attitude of the cop dismissing
our concerns as 'just another form of vandalism.' Because we're so
underrepresented in newsrooms, our society is so unaware of these
microaggressions. Some people will say it's biased to have an Asian woman
covering a story about shootings that involve Asian women. If anything, it's an
asset to share this perspective that nobody understands. Who's going to report
on [racist incidents] if they don't even recognize them?"
In the immediate aftermath of the
Atlanta shootings, AAJA received reports from some members that their newsrooms
were excluding them from assignments to cover the crimes, for fear that they
were too biased or "emotionally invested" to do the job fairly.
(Black journalists around the country reported similar experiences last summer
regarding their ability to cover the Black Lives Matter protests following
George Floyd's slaying by police in Minneapolis.)
"If there is a reporter who has
the expertise and the language capabilities to cover the community, they
deserve the right of first refusal," says Lee of AAJA's advice in such
situations. "They are the most qualified person in your newsroom to cover
and navigate the community and all its complexities."
At the same time, Lee says she also
fielded several requests from national news outlets scrambling for
Korean-speaking freelancers in Atlanta to help unearth information about the
four Korean victims. It took longer than it typically does with other mass
shooting casualties (of which the U.S. has had plenty) for biographical details
to emerge about some of the slain Asian women. The body of Daoyou Feng, who had
no known family in the U.S., was unclaimed in the morgue for seven days, and
even a photograph did not emerge until three weeks after her death when 40
strangers from Atlanta's Chinese American community held a funeral for her
April 6.
On
the other side of the country, The Sacramento Bee reporter
Jeong Park began compiling a Twitter thread translating
key details in reports from Atlanta-based Korean-language media, which were in
a position to be journalistic first responders not merely because of their
linguistic facility but also because of their pre-existing immersion in the
local Korean scene. Those reporters were already familiar with the Korean small
businesses and could dive into their networks to quickly find witnesses, who under
such traumatic circumstances were more comfortable speaking with outlets who
had built relationships among the community.
"The Korean media's sourcing was a
lot better because mainstream media doesn't typically cover these
communities," Park says, adding that the vantage point of the two types of
outlets also differed. "Early on, there was a rush [in English-language
media] to talk more in the framework of law enforcement. Korean media is
focused on how [the shootings] affect their community, which is understandable
because the mainstream media usually comes from an outside point of view."
Still,
Park is quick to note that he's not trying to draw a value judgment between the
two. Korean media relies more heavily on anonymous sourcing than mainstream Western
publications generally find acceptable, and it isn't foolproof: Park points to
an early Korean report that shared an anti-Asian social media post allegedly
from the shooter, which Facebook later confirmed was fake.
One solution, Park recommends, is for English-language outlets to form
collaborations with their ethnic media counterparts.
NBC News' March 10 special "The Racism Virus" was pitched by Vicky Nguyen and producer Jamie Nguyen (no relation) and greenlighted by a diverse group of execs.
The Case for cultural competency
Hearing CNN national correspondent
Natasha Chen says shooting victim Xiaojie Tan's name as her family did can be a
surprisingly poignant experience, when everything else about how her adopted
country treated her race, gender, line of work, and circumstance of death
seemed to flatten her humanity.
But
Chen and other Asian American journalists say that cultural competency goes beyond
— and doesn't even necessarily require — knowing the language or dialect, of
which the Asian diaspora contains more than 2,300, by one count. "One of
the questions we always ask of grieving family members is, 'If [the deceased]
were here right now, what would you say?'" says Chen, who interviewed
Tan's daughter, Jami Webb. "The usual answer is, 'I would tell them I love
them,' and Jami said that too."
Chen
sensed there was more, and asked a follow-up: "You didn't do that a lot,
did you?" Webb admitted she and her mother seldom expressed their
affection directly. "I felt Jami's pain in feeling like she missed that
opportunity," Chen tells THR.
"Traditional Asian moms show their love through acts of service — cutting
you fruit every night, asking if you're hungry. Because [saying 'I love you']
is such a common response, if the reporter were not someone with a shared
background, that context would have been missed."
Jeff Nguyen, a reporter for CBS' Los
Angeles affiliate, notes that one distinguishing mark of a superlative reporter
is knowing the follow-up questions to ask. "As journalists, we have to be
mindful of not putting ourselves in the story, but my personal experiences make
me a better interviewer," he says. "If I interview an Asian American
man, I better understand his [desires] to prove his Americanness by enlisting
in the military or joining law enforcement. If I interview a woman of AAPI
descent, I understand her concerns about being sexualized."
NBC Asian America reporter Kimmy Yam
says that her working-class Fujianese upbringing has helped her "parse
out" the intersectional class, gender and ethnicity issues in her coverage
of ongoing attacks against Asian Americans: "People chalk it up to
pandemic racism, but coming from a family that has lived in these areas in
Chinatown that are low-income and experience a lot of violence, I can see that
a lot of the violence preceded the pandemic or has just been exacerbated by
it."
Yam's
background underscores the diversity within Asian America, a reality that media
outlets would do well to grasp when seeking to cover specifc communities and
people. "There are so many differences in this vast diaspora from the largest continent on Earth, and to everyone else, it's just 'Asian,'"
says Last Week Tonight With John Oliver senior news
producer Marian Wang, a former reporter at ProPublica. "We
don't think about that with any level of detail when we staff newsrooms. It's
very different if your family came on an H1B visa five years ago [versus] a
student visa in the '80s or as a refugee. I'm worried that we're not ready for
those conversations at that level of granularity, and it's in everyone's
interest that we gain fluency in covering the diaspora."
There
are inherent benefits to lived experience, but some journalists note that
fluency can be acquired as well. "We need to be hiring better and smarter,
but you can cover assorted cultures with some basic guidelines. The language
may be a challenge, but there are always people who speak English wherever you
go," says Anh Do, who covers Asian American issues as part of her metro
beat for the Los Angeles Times. "It's just
a matter of whether you have the patience to listen and bypass the accents to
really open yourself up to hearing the untold things they have to say."
To
master a community beat over the long term, Do, a second-generation journalist
who previously worked for the U.S.' largest Vietnamese-language paper,
the Người Việt Daily News, also advocates taking a page
from ethnic media and engaging with local events, from cultural celebrations to
business openings to political debates. "It's like being a foreign
correspondent in your own backyard," she says. "If people see your
face often enough, they will be like a tourist guide to you. Your genuine
interest and searching questions will spark all sorts of responses, and it will
lead to better storytelling and deeper bonds."
In
fact, AAJA cautions against expecting journalists of color to solely bear the
burden and responsibility for telling their communities' stories, particularly
the traumatic ones. Last month, AAJA published a compilation of mental wellness
resources for its members, and in the wake of the Atlanta shootings launched
the AAPI Journalists Therapy Relief
Fund, which to date has raised more than $70,000. The night after
the massacre, the group also organized a Zoom session with two licensed AAPI therapists
on standby for its members.
"It's not commonplace for AAPI
journalists to talk frankly about how they're feeling and why they're feeling
that way. They have an aversion to it because they're journalists, but also
because [attention to mental health] is not a cultural thing," says AAJA's
Lee. "But they've spent the past year covering the violence against people
who remind them of their parents and grandparents. At a certain point, you
can't extricate the humanity of yourself from the journalist. It's all
intertwined."
Learning
to lean in
Journalists are trained not to become the story, but CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang saw her racial identity make headlines last year when her news conference questions about the Trump administration's pandemic response repeatedly drew the ire of the then-president and his officials, one of whom reportedly called the novel coronavirus "kung flu" in direct conversation with Jiang.
Weijia
Jiang found herself making headlines in May 2020 when President Trump told her
to "ask China" in response to a question about the U.S. coronavirus
death toll.
"Every time I would press the
administration about their response or ask a question that was interpreted as a
criticism, my inbox would be flooded with questions about my patriotism and
whether I was a CCP [Chinese Communist Party] plant," she says. "That
was difficult, because I am a proud American and an immigrant. And so being on
display in that way could be challenging at times."
The
China-born, West Virginia-raised Jiang, whose memoir, Other, will be released next spring, says that one of
her biggest regrets as a young reporter was downplaying her personal identity
in her work. "I was so hesitant to pitch stories about the Asian American
community," she says. "I was worried about being pigeonholed and
thought of as someone who either only got her job because she's a minority or
is an activist. And so I regret not using my job to be a voice for a community
that may not have one otherwise."
MSNBC anchor Richard Lui, who at CNN in
2007 became the first Asian American male ever to anchor a daily national
newscast, shared similar fears early in his career, especially coming up at a
time when there were so few journalists who looked like him at that stage.
"Do I want to be pigeonholed as the AAPI pitching AAPI stories? It's what
I dealt with when I first joined CNN and for a while at MSNBC," he says,
adding that about a decade ago, his mentality shifted, as it has for so many of
his fellow Asian American colleagues. "I'm seeing it in the eyes and words
that everyone's using. I know that I have a responsibility, and it's OK to do
this. I am a subject matter expert when it comes to talking about growing up
Asian in America."
It's
important to note that, given the multifaceted nature of the Asian American
experience, some members of the community have been shy to claim the identity
in their work for a very different reason. "I'm in a position of enormous
privilege. What right do I have to weigh in on these conversations or comment
that I feel drained or emotionally invested in this story at all?"
says The New York Times' California Today correspondent Jill
Cowan, who is biracial, of the conflicted grief she's felt in processing the
Atlanta shootings. As with so many other journalists, the work of reporting has
been a place of refuge: "For me, it's been helpful to report, to talk to
people who know more about the discourse around anti-Asian racism."
Says Lee, "We're trying to be as
visible as possible because there are so many out there feeling unheard and
unseen. What you're seeing from AAPI journalists now is that this invisibility
has hurt our professional opportunities, our news coverage, and our community's
ability to be thoughtfully covered in the news."
In
March, Jiang — now covering a different administration — used her turn during the White House's
(reinstituted) daily press briefing to ask whether President Joe Biden had a
response to the graphic assaults against Asian American elders being shared on
social media. "I distinctly remember when [activist] Amanda Nguyen's Feb. 5 viral
video [describing recent attacks and pleading for the media's
attention] came out; the next day I had a seat in the White House briefing
room," she says. "I don't know that someone else would ask about the
videos and if the president was aware of these attacks and what policy changes
might come out of them."
For
some, the documented beatings of Asian Americans over the past year have
brought to mind an incident from 39 years ago, when Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in Detroit by
two white men who were angry about the Japanese auto industry's effect on local
jobs. "The ones who went to help the case of Vincent Chin be told and
heard and documented were journalists like Corky Lee, Ti-Hua
Chang and Helen Zia. They were three out of only dozens of members of AAJA at
the time," Lui says. "Now we have 1,700. And today, to see our
journalism community's honesty and poise and ability to embrace our responsibility
as civil rights reporters for an ignored history — it's an amazing thing."
A
version of this story first appeared in the April 14 issue of The
Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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