Diverse Voices Joining Together: Ethnic Media’s Coverage of the Dual Pandemics of Racial Oppression and COVID-19
The Maynard Institute highlighted voices from African-American, Chinese, Latino and Filipino media leaders in a digital dialogue on their long-standing coverage of structural disparities, and the crucial role of a collective movement for racial equity.
By Aaron Glantz
The police killing of George Floyd and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that followed. The escalating death toll and economic wreckage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The president’s deployment of overly racist language and threats of military might on America’s streets. His administration’s ongoing crackdown on immigrants and their families.
These are not disconnected stories, as they are often portrayed in our country’s largest media outlets.They are different sides of the same story of racism and inequality in America. People of color are not only dying at the hands of police, they are also disproportionately perishing of the new coronavirus. They are losing their jobs and businesses amid lockdowns at higher rates than whites, kept out of the stimulus by Trump administration policies, and victimized by hate crimes perpetrated by assailants who mimic the president’s racist language.
Moreover, this is not a story that is merely playing out in white and black but in an increasingly diverse tapestry of colors. The proportion of the U.S. population made up of non-Hispanic whites now sits at just 60 percent, according to the Census Bureau. Approximately one in seven Americans are foreign born.
“It’s not the stories that they’re missing. It’s the context,” Rong Xiaoqing, a reporter at the Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily, said of most big media coverage. Due to a lack of diversity at the leadership level and amid the reporting ranks, mainstream outlets have largely failed to make connections between today’s breaking stories that ethnic media journalists find obvious.
“Mainstream media would be well served to listen and learn from the ethnic media,” notes Martin Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, which last week brought ethnic media journalists together for a virtual conversation on coverage of racial prejudice and systemic inequities impacting the African-American, Chinese, Latino and Filipino communities.
There’s a reason that ethnic media come with greater insight. Nationally approximately 80 percent of newsroom leaders and frontline journalists are white and approach stories of racial justice as outsiders. That has a huge impact on “the incidents they choose to cover (and) how they frame those incidents,” said Khalil Abdullah, former managing editor at the Washington Afro and a contributing editor at Ethnic Media Services.
By contrast, ethnic media journalists have been deeply embedded in their communities for decades. As a result, they are better able to see the connections that the mainstream media misses.
“Amid America’s reckoning, the power of the voice and coverage of ethnic media is especially clear,” said Odette Alcazaren-Keeley, director of the Maynard 200 initiative, which seeks to train 200 journalism leaders of color by 2023. For decades, Alcazaren-Keeley said, the sector has been documenting for their diverse audiences “systemic disparities impacting communities of color, including healthcare and insurance access, education, high-level paying jobs, nutrition, housing, and the overall access to opportunity.”
One example of how diverse media journalists see the connections of these structural divides: the multi-layered reaction of the Latino community to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Maria Alejandra Bastida, vice president of digital content for Mundo Hispanico in Atlanta, told participants at the Maynard Institute’s virtual conversation that as demonstrators swept through the city following George Floyd’s death the story “exploded on social media” with a fury of likes, shares and WhatsApp chats that spanned borders.
And yet, when Bastida looked at the crowds that came out to protest she did not see many Latino faces. Hundreds of protesters were arrested, she said, but only nine were Latino. The answer, she said, was that while community members were largely supportive of Black Lives Matter, there was also fear of being detained during an immigration crackdown. So community members felt safer sharing their voices on social media.
At Mundo Hispanico, Bastida said, Black Lives Matter protests were discussed alongside the Trump administration’s decision to bar families with mixed immigration status from receiving $1,200 stimulus checks — a decision which cut out not only undocumented immigrants, but also U.S.-citizen spouses of undocumented immigrants and children born in the United States to immigrant parents (immigrant rights groups have sued, calling it unconstitutional).
The decision to leave behind millions of immigrant families from the stimulus has been noted by leading media, but barely, like a blip on the radar.
Troy Espera, head of news production for North America at ABS-CBN International — The Filipino Channel, said the mainstream media has largely ignored the story of the pandemic’s impact on Filipino-American healthcare workers even as it valorized nurses as heroes. “There are whole families, parents and children, going into work and surviving,” Espera said, “and unfortunately some of them don’t survive. That’s very real for us.”
For Xiaoqing at Sing Tao Daily, a missed story is the connection between the rise of anti-Asian hate violence and the charity extended by many Chinese-American leaders. Since the pandemic began, Xiaoqing has been documenting the stories of Asian Americans who’ve been spat on and assaulted, and told to “go back where you came from.”
She’s also told the stories of people who’ve donated personal protective equipment (PPE), like masks and gloves, to hospitals. It was only by telling those two stories together, she said, that those two reporting threads were connected — that many times the victims and helpers were the same people, and, in some cases, that they were donating the PPE to show that they were truly “American.”
Reynolds, of the Maynard Institute, said by failing to diversify their ranks — and missing stories, mainstream media outlets risk becoming irrelevant.
“Like the nation, journalism is at an inflection point,” Reynolds said. Not only are many newsrooms in crisis, but there is a lack of trust between many media outlets and their audiences.
The “systemic lack of diversity and inclusion in our newsrooms.” Reynolds explained, is not unlike the lack of representation in policing, banking and other powerful institutions. “People have to decide who they are going to be. Are you going to be a sustainer of systemic racism, a facilitator of systemic racism, a supporter of systemic racism, or a dismantler?”
That starts with a change in the way many large media power brokers view stories. Instead of being seen as outsiders peering in to communities of color, they need to be seen as a vibrant part of diverse communities — much like ethnic media already is.
“The soul of American journalism is at stake,” Reynolds said. “As a profession, we must reconcile that we are part of the very system that protesters in this area are pressing up against.”
Aaron Glantz is a senior reporter at Reveal and author of the book Homewreckers. He is also the track-executive-in-residence for Storytelling, for the Maynard 200 journalism fellowship program.
