Ethnic Media Take On Race Challenge

SAN FRANCISCO – When Tae Sook Jeong, editor-in-chief of The Korea Times, attended a town hall meeting in San Francisco after a local Asian weekly published a column called “Why I Hate Blacks,” he realized it wasn’t enough to say sorry. “We need to know what’s being whispered in our own backyards,” says Jeong. “We need a get-to-know-each-other campaign.” The first national poll of race relations among Asian Americans, African Americans and Hispanics from New America Media is a “starting point” in that campaign, says Jeong. The Korea Times, along with eight other major ethnic newspapers, signed on as a co-sponsor of the poll because ethnic media are increasingly becoming aware that it’s not enough just to cover their own communities. "This is an extraordinary piece of information that can hopefully help our three communities to have a better understanding of each other,” said Pedro Rojas, La Opinión's executive editor."Wherever you live and work in the states today, and especially for us in California, learning from communities near us and around us is vital to growing,” says Anh Do, vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News in Westminster, Calif., one of the oldest Vietnamese newspapers in the country and a sponsor of the survey.“We have to understand what’s going on in the real world,” agrees Maria Mejia, editor of El Mensajero, a Spanish-language weekly in San Francisco published by ImpreMedia media group, another of the co-sponsors. “People say this is a Latino paper, and that’s an African American paper, but we are all part of the same society.” But when it comes to covering that society, ethnic media editors and publishers find themselves navigating through a minefield. When Tim Lau, chief executive officer of the Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily, hears stories about crimes in Oakland’s Chinatown or San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley he worries about how to cover the issue. “There is a perception that the crimes are committed by African Americans,” says Lau. “We want victims to report the crimes. But we don’t want to add to the stereotypes.” “But it’s important to find out if they are real or just anecdotal,” says Gail Berkley, editor at the Sun Reporter which serves the African-American community in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Without knowing the facts you cannot have a dialogue.”The New America Media poll found deep racial tensions and suspicions among the main ethnic groups even though there was also widespread optimism about the future of a multi-racial America. SOURCE OF THIS STORY