A Hot Journalism Trend: The Growth of Ethnic Media

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Across America, 25 percent of adults get their news from ethnic media. Are they getting quality journalism?

By Michael Kay and Caroline Wingate

(Jan. 27, 2007) — The Wen Ho Lee case exploded into the news on the front page of The New York Times in 1999: "Breach at Los Alamos ... China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, U.S. Aides Say." Reacting as usual to a big Times story, the national media grabbed it and ran, quoting the usual highly placed sources who were using words like "espionage" and "traitor."

Make that the mainstream national media. Chinese Americans were reading another Wen Ho Lee story. As the Taiwan-born scientist sat in prison for 278 days, reporters for the World Journal, Sing Tao Daily, China Press, Chinese Times and others interviewed Chinese American engineers and scientists. They talked to Lee's family members, his colleagues and his friends. In editorials, the papers demanded a complete government investigation, calling it absurd that a Taiwan-born American would spy for mainland China. They worried that U.S. companies would stop hiring Taiwanese scientists.

The government's case — and The Times' story — soon fell apart. Lee walked free with an apology from the judge. He sued the government for invasion of privacy and settled last year for $1.65 million. Five news organizations — The New York Times, ABC News, The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post — paid almost half the tab.

Most Americans rarely hear the other side of such stories — the side told in Vietnamese, Spanish, Farsi, Swahili, Mandarin, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu. Told by radio, newspaper, TV and the web to communities of Hmong, Russians and Native Americans, of Haitians, Portuguese, Africans and African Americans.

Ethnic media is huge and it's growing — along with the nation's ethnic population of more than 64 million. Almost half of those people get their news primarily from ethnic sources. The umbrella group New America Media arrived at these figures in a multi-lingual poll funded by Knight Foundation. The poll, in 2005, also discovered that 51 million people — about a fourth of all U.S. adults — use ethnic radio, television, newspapers and web sites to some extent.

A Familiar Voice

The ethnic media speak to newcomers in familiar voices, familiar languages, offering help in a confusing new world — explaining immigration law, locating English classes, giving advice on the workplace, explaining how to enroll the kids in school. They report what's happening back home — not the wars and earthquakes and tsunamis but the everyday things that NBC or the Detroit News or CNN don't have the time or space to report. 

"We see ourselves as fulfilling a really important role of keeping the community together," said Gwen Muranaka of the 103-year-old Rafu Shimpo. She called her bilingual newspaper "the voice of the community" for Japanese Americans in the Los Angeles area.

In serving its huge and fragmented audience, these diverse and fragmented ethnic outlets share a willingness to take on controversial issues like Wen Ho Lee, and to cover stories left untouched by mainstream media.

"No single media could cover what the stories are of our communities," said Julian Do, southern California director for New America Media. "For a publication like the L.A. Times it would be impossible to provide a constant stream of what's happening in ... the [local ethnic] communities."

Or further from home. It took The Muslim Observer, for example, to report on plans for a Muslim pilgrimage site in Spain, where Cordoba's Muslim Association wants to build a half-size replica of the city's eighth-century mosque. It is asking for funds in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Morocco and Egypt. The Observer, a weekly circulated in all 50 states, noted the fears of Spain's Roman Catholic bishops that "the church's waning influence may be further eclipsed by resurgent Islam financed from abroad."

Ethnic media also look at major news — like the explosive immigration story — through a special lens:

• Dennis Romero wrote of the significant minority of Latinos who have joined the fight against illegal immigration. He even found a few Mexican-Americans working with the Minutemen, the armed, self-appointed monitors of the Mexican border. His piece in the Los Angeles magazine, Tu Ciudad, won a NAM award for best investigative reporting.
• Chinese viewers got the story of undocumented immigrants in reports, in Mandarin, from U.S.-Mexican border by KSCI-TV in Los Angeles.

The Size of It All

Measuring the ethnic media universe is difficult. The best source is NAM's National Ethnic Media Directory‘s list of more than 1,800 print, online and broadcast outlets. But this represents only a fraction of the total — an unscientific count produced more than 1,300 Spanish-language print, radio and TV outlets. The Asian audience is also large: in print media alone, more than 110 newspapers and magazines were serving its varied communities in 2003. Of the print media, almost all have found a place on the web — even the tiniest, like El Puente in Indiana, with its homey snapshots of family celebrations.

Despite their importance to their communities and to adding dimension to the overall picture of this nation, the ethnic media have their flaws and their weaknesses — and their critics ready to pounce. These critics, calling ethnic media inward-looking and ethnocentric, claim they fragment the country by promoting insularity and hindering assimilation.

In 2002, a multilingual poll in the San Francisco Bay Area sought answers to a number of questions about the ethnic media, including whether "immigrants who feel a strong sense of community with their country of origin fail to develop a strong sense of community with Americans." The simple answer they found: No. Ethnic media don't isolate their audiences; they introduce immigrants to civic issues and help them become part of American political life.

The researchers used the Wen Ho Lee case to support these findings, pointing out that the persistence of ethnic media in exposing the weakness of the case produced a democratic result: Chinese Americans had become engaged with the larger American community.

Still, mainstream journalists often see the ethnic press as too activist, too militant. Too prone to voice only the views of their community. Too passionate.

Mainstream journalists deplored the lack of objectivity in the Cuban American press' coverage of the Elian Gonzalez saga. When U.S. agents seized the Cuban boy from his relatives' Miami home and reunited him with his father, Miami's Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald had a giant two-word headline: "How Shameful!" The Miami Herald's, while equally gigantic, equally excited, didn't take sides. "Seized!" it screamed.

In L.A. last March, Latino deejays exhorted their listeners to hit the streets in protest of anti-immigrant legislation proposed in the U.S. Senate. Several on-air personalities locked arms in a Univision promo and chanted "Unite. Unite. Unite." Organizers had expected 20,000 protesters; instead the popular media stars propelled 500,000 angry Latinos into the streets.

Such campaigns follow a long tradition. Rafu Shimpo, for example, campaigned tirelessly after World War II that Japanese Americans be recompensed for the losses they suffered while interned in U.S. government camps. The paper itself had been forced to shut down during the war when its publisher became one of 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to the internment camps. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan apologized to internees and signed legislation authorizing payments to the 60,000 still living.

The black press began its battle against racism in 1827. Declaring "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us," Freedom's Journal began publishing editorials that condemned slavery, lynching and other injustices. At the end of the 19^th century, Ida B. Wells denounced lynching in her Memphis newspaper, The Free Speech. Beginning in 1908 and continuing through the civil right era, The Chicago Defender was a strong voice demanding an end to laws denying black Americans not only the vote but decent jobs, housing and education.

The Money Factor

Despite a few Hispanic and Asian giants, many ethnic media remain small, and lacking in resources — both financial and those provided by experience and training — making it impossible to cover complex issues. They may be produced weekly or monthly or sporadically — maybe even from someone's basement or garage. They need money, and they need to know how to go looking for it. Their staffs are small and many have never been journalists. Ethnic media networks like NAM and others (see sidebar) are working to improve the situation.

Access too can be difficult. In March of last year the Independent Press Association-New York found that government agencies "often don't return phone calls or provide relevant information" to the ethnic press. The most unhelpful federal agencies were the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Affairs and the Department of Labor, the association's survey found.

Calling 2006 "the year of ethnic media," USA Today noted that advertisers now target the ethnic audiences they once dismissed as "too small, too poor or too old." Minority markets now account for nearly a third of U.S. buying power, the paper said.

But the lack of solid numbers on the true size of ethnic media, along with advertisers' failure to realize the importance of immigrant and nonwhite audiences, has made advertising more difficult to attract and less lucrative for ethnic outlets than traditional media.

 "Typically ethnic media [advertising] tends to be priced a little bit lower" compared to relative-sized mainstream outlets, said Mary Kordus of ad placement agency NewMark Communications, though she notes the price of ads can depend on the region.

The $4.26 billion that advertisers spent on Spanish-language media accounted for just 4 percent of the $106.5 billion they spent on TV, local newspapers and national magazines in 2005.

As new research provides dependable figures and as advertiser interest in this huge market grows, ethnic media ad sales should improve. Television is expected to lead, as Hispanics of all ages watch much more television than the general U.S. population. Spending on Hispanic broadcast and cable networks is likely to grow 16.4 percent a year through 2009; the English-language forecast is 9.4 percent.

Past and Present

Such success holds the promise that the 275-year history of America's ethnic media will continue.

The black press is fighting as always, with affirmative action currently in its lens. "Black leaders fear 2007 could bring an end to affirmative action, causing a reversal in decades-old policies established for racial and economic justice," NNPA News Service — the national news wire for the black press — warned early this year.

Muslim communities remain vigilant for religious and racial profiling after 9/11. News that Halliburton had a $385 million contract to build detention centers in the U.S. set off alarms since one purpose was to prepare for "an emergency influx of immigrants." The fear was more Muslims would be detained without due process. Ronald Takaki of UC-Berkeley wondered in a Pacific News Service commentary: "What lessons can we learn from the history of detention centers of an earlier war?"

Hispanic media keeps track of anti-immigrant moves everywhere. In Dallas, Al Día has its eye on small-town Texas, reporting in January on a Carrollton city council candidate who wants renters to prove their immigration status — this city has already made English its official language, and its police department has refused training on immigration laws.

It seems then that ethnic media will be around for as long as immigrants continue to arrive — and as long as minorities need a voice.

Michael Kay, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, was a Knight Foundation intern. Caroline Wingate is a former foreign news editor at The Miami Herald.