Good afternoon – or as I will attempt to say in Indonesian: “Selamat siang.”
I am honored to be here to speak before such a distinguished group of journalists and non-journalists interested in how our global media cover minorities and people of color.
This is my first trip to Indonesia, therefore my first opportunity to experience the island of Bali and to greet journalists from other countries in so serene and beautiful a setting.
Arriving yesterday at the airport reminded me of the time I was in Johannesburg some years back ready to return to the United States after spending more than two weeks speaking to South African and African journalists and leading a series of workshops on news reporting, writing and covering different cultures.
As I awaited my flight, I was saddened to say goodbye to the man who had been my guide, my driver and mentor during my stay. His name was Marshall Montshiwa, and he had helped me avert some cultural landmines and unwitting mistakes during my visit. When we said our farewells, I was grateful for his help and also touched that, as a private man, Marshall was still willing to talk about his family and personal life. So as we said our goodbyes at the airport, without thinking, I leaned over and gave him a big hug.
Big mistake.
I could immediately tell it was the wrong thing to do. I sensed Marshall’s shoulders stiffen as I embraced him. I felt his awkwardness and discomfort and knew that I had crossed a personal boundary – even though he never said a word. As we stepped back, however, Marshall managed to smile and put out his fist to give me a knuckle tap. “Next time,” he said, “we do this.”
The following year, I was invited back to speak again in South Africa and it was Marshall who picked me up at the airport. When we spotted each other at the terminal, we waved at one another and as he approached, Marshall once again greeted me with a smile. Overjoyed to see him, I was ready this time and made sure to put out my fist to give him a knuckle tap – only to have Marshall immediately embrace me with a hug.
Apparently we both had been thinking about how to bridge our cultural divide, how to resolve our personal differences.
I tell you this story because, first of all, I very likely may make some cultural gaffes this week in meeting some of you from Indonesia and other countries. I may offend or confuse some of you with what I say or do. And if so, believe me, there is no intention on my part to be disrespectful. Nor is it my intent to appear ignorant. If it happens, just let me know that a knuckle tap is more appropriate.
Secondly, this story reminds me that as world citizens – and particularly as journalists – we must constantly be aware of our cultural surroundings and be sensitive to the mores and traditions and beliefs that those different from ourselves hold so dearly.
A lack of cultural awareness or absence of cultural competency may reduce the number of people willing to talk to us as individuals. But, as journalists, that blind spot surely will interfere with our ability to report accurately and fairly on differing communities. It can impair our research, undermine our interviews, cloud our observations and corrupt our writing. It can make our coverage less comprehensive and less insightful. It can result in stories so wrongheaded or so superficial that we risk deepening the distrust and skepticism that too many people, unfortunately, already have of those of us in the media and the stories we produce.
Reporting on minorities – and reporting on them in an accurate, fair, ethical way – is important not just for the reputation of our news organizations but for the good of society, for the good of our individual countries, and for the good of our global relationships.
It is essential journalism. It is inclusive journalism. It is ethical journalism.
While the reporting of minorities is vital to us all, defining who is a minority can be ever changing, ever shifting. Hindus are the majority here in Bali and a minority in the rest of Indonesia. Muslims are the vast majority in Indonesia but are a distinct minority in my own country.
The United States, as you know, is predominantly white or Anglo. The last census figures show the U.S. as 66 % non-Hispanic white, 14% Hispanic, 12 % black or African American, 4% Asian American and less than 1% Native American or American Indian. Meanwhile, 2% of Americans list themselves as multiracial.
Yet, that face of America is changing.
According to a study this year by the Pew Research Center in Washington, whites will no longer be the majority in America by the year 2050. With increasing immigration rates and climbing birth totals of non-whites, the number of brown and black residents in the United States will eclipse those of their white counterparts. That has already happened in such key states as California and Texas.
In Los Angeles alone, where I live, there are more than 200 languages spoken including more than 90 in the city’s schools. That diversity of speech and communication reflects how communities have changed and underscore the richness – and the challenges – that a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual city brings.
What this demographic change has meant for public policy and governmental services has been profound. It has had a societal impact and effect on everything from education and health care to commerce and faith. In New York City where Pentacostalism is among the fastest growing forms of Christianity, a New York Times series showed last year that it was not just Pentecostals but Latino Pentecostals who are transforming some of the poorest, most needy neighborhoods with their storefront churches and outreach among immigrants.
In Los Angeles, immigrants have helped revamp the sports scene and now one of the two local, major professional soccer teams is called Chivas USA, an outgrowth of a successful futbol club in Mexico. While the other L.A. soccer team features a player named Beckham, who arrived from the UK and has changed the local and national sports map with his on-the-pitch playing style and his off-the-field pitch as a celebrity icon.
But changing communities – whether American cities or your own towns – are no less important to journalists.
We are the ones who often find ourselves as the conduit of news and views between groups. We are the ones who can provide a glimpse, or a longer-lasting look, into a given community or culture. We are often the ones whose words and images help people define one another and form enduring opinions about those who are different from ourselves.
Often we are not only the purveyors of information about the new groups to our established readers or viewers or listeners. More and more, we are finding that our audience is comprised of those new arrivals. Driven by the growth of ethnic media and the Internet, our overall audience includes the newcomer as well as the “old” – and by that I mean “longtime” – reader, listener or viewer.
In an era when we are driven by the latest technology and seeking fresh approaches to storytelling, we must find ways to cater to that fresh audience of immigrants, many of them thirsting for information about themselves and about others. Our traditional group of news consumer may ask the questions: “Who are the these newcomers? And what do they want?” But these new immigrants are asking: “How do I thrive here? And what must I do?”
To both groups the news media – whether traditional corporate media or community-based ethnic media or independent media – are crucial in finding some answers.
So what kind of job have we journalists been doing when it comes to reporting on minorities, especially racial and religious minorities?
I would say the results have been uneven with some good-to-excellent reporting mixed in with some woefully poor and destructive examples. There has been some breathtaking journalism that has done much to explain the circumstances of minority groups and the obstacles they face, whether those hurdles are in the guise of racism or disparities in health care or outright discrimination. Insightful stories have told us about ordinary lives in powerful ways and there have been some courageous reporting on minorities done in war zones, during conflicts and in times of distress where merely reporting on a minority group can mean the loss of freedom or a life-or-death call for the reporter or the persons he or she is writing about.
What characterizes the flawed stories? They include pieces that focus solely on conflict and tension between differing groups. They emphasize the sensational, the controversial and the superficial. And they include those pieces that give little or no context to what is happening or fail to show perspective. Readers and viewers are left to see what happened without understanding why or answer the question: Why is that so? How did it get that way? Meanwhile, other faulty stories on minorities dump their subjects exclusively into the stereotyped story bins of crime, celebrity and sports. Or foods and festivals. Or the phenomenon of so-called “zoo” stories: the look-at-how-exotic-these-people-are kind of reporting.
So why do we have these inaccurate – and potentially harmful – stories?
I believe that, in part, it’s because so many of us are averse to tackling a subject as sensitive as race or as volatile as racism. We are reluctant to talk honestly and candidly about those subjects in our newsrooms let alone on our news pages or in our broadcasts or on our Web sites.
We don’t want to offend. We don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. We don’t feel equipped to report or write about such controversial issues. As a result, sometimes our wariness becomes timidity, and our caution turns to fear. The result is that we settle for the easiest story, which is often the flimsiest one. Or we decide on no story at all. In effect, we ignore or marginalize a given group or community. Fearful of offending our majority audience or angering a volatile minority one, we turn a blank eye and provide an empty page to a particular group or community – and end up doing a disservice to us all.
At this point, I want to emphasize that I, as an American journalist, do not presume to know the state of journalism in your individual countries or pretend to understand your newsroom cultures. I certainly am not here to tell you what to do.
However, I would ask you to consider these suggestions that I have found to be helpful in reporting on minorities.
• First of all, we must have frank and honest conversations about race, ethnicity and culture. We need to talk across our differences and find a safe place to have lasting discussions about these difficult subjects. We must stay in the room and stay in the conversation even as the temperature rises and passions heat up.
• We need to get out of the newsroom and into the community. We must view first hand how people live and work, worship and play. We must find out what they truly talk about and what concerns them.
When I was in South Africa I discovered that most of the reporters and editors at my workshops had never been to a local black township like Soweto although they worked in and around Johannesburg. Nor did those who worked in Cape Town ever walk the streets of the Bo-Kaap Muslim district although they drove by there all the time. So we spent time visiting Soweto and walking the streets of the Bo-Kaap district talking and – more importantly – listening to people.
Remember that being there is important to our journalism, especially when it comes reporting on minorities.
• We also must read, listen and pay attention to the ethnic and community media that are often the bulletin board of minority groups and the historical record of that community.
• We must take advantage of the Internet and its incredible reach and view the credible blogs and online Web sites that act as portals into a community. We need to look for that missing voice in our reporting. It may be there online – the young person’s perspective, the disenfranchised person’s point of view, the minority-within-a-minority who has something to say.
In fact, we must be ever conscious of the fact that there is diversity within diversity. And there are indeed minority voices in a minority group.
• We need to diversify our newsrooms to add varied points of view and to see who is missing from our newsroom discussion. Who is absent from our published pages?
And while minority journalists from a given community may have the knowledge and sources to tell that group’s story, it should not be their responsibility alone. Some of the toughest reporting there is involves covering your own community, your own people, particularly when doing a critical story that must be done.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but in reporting on minority communities, we must maintain our same high journalistic standards. We must meet that same ethical bar. After all, reporting on minorities should not compromise our journalistic credibility; it should enhance it.
What else can we do to strengthen our coverage of minorities?
• We must find the authentic voices, the real voices of a community and listen and report on them rather than settle for the so-called or self-styled leaders of a minority group. Be mindful of who is quoted and whether they truly speak for a given group or merely for themselves.
• We must embrace complexity and not settle for the simple, easy story. When it comes to race and ethnicity, these can be complicated issues, difficult subjects, hard-to-get stories. We need to spend the time to uncover those layers, dig deeper and accept that there are shades of gray that add nuance to a story.
• We need to provide context and perspective to stories and give our media audience some history so that people will understand what drives a community’s rage, or what lies underneath that tension or what feeds that particular conflict.
• We must use precise language to say what we mean and avoid the euphemisms and the code words that can confuse rather than clarify.
For example, in the U.S., the media often use the phrase “inner city” as shorthand to describe a neighborhood that they usually mean is poor, urban and mostly black – as in “the projects” or “the slums” –while also maintaining that it is the geographic core of a city. Well by that murky definition, that could mean George Bush and his family live in the White House in that Inner City of Washington, D.C.
• Finally, we must recognize the power of the personal story. The immigrant’s own words and own voice can be a powerful storytelling tool. So, too, can a reporter’s personal essay or “story-behind-the-story” account of what they witnessed or experienced in reporting a piece on minorities.
I myself immigrated to the United States when I was quite young. I was born in the Philippines and my family comes from the most remote, most northern province called Batanes. It is known as the Land of the Typhoons and is home to the indigenous people called Ivatans.
That may explain why I do a lot of work with the indigenous people in America, writing about Native American issues – including a recent story on how Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated Indian Country – for a Web site called reznetnews.org and mentoring Native American student journalists. Many of our stories come from what we call “the rez” or American Indian reservations where so many tribes were forced to relocate, even though they are sovereign nations within the U.S. nation.
American Indians have experienced a long history of betrayal, neglect and outright abandonment by the government and the majority community – and that goes the same historically for their encounters with mainstream media. That has changed for the better but many Native Americans – the smallest minority in a country of minorities – feel they lost their ability to tell their own stories in a media they do not trust.
Telling the untold or little told story, giving voice to those whose stories have been overlooked. Those have been the hopes I carry with me, in the organizations that I have had the opportunity to work for in journalism, whether reporting for the Los Angeles Times or in my post-Times life.
At the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism where I am a Senior Fellow, we have taken American journalists to the border towns of Mexico and to the capital of Mexico City to talk with border crossers and local residents, with Mexican officials and Mexican journalists, so that American journalists could gain a better understanding of the Mexican side of the immigration issue, the border problem and the economic fallout.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida not only has sent me abroad to work with journalists in South Africa but they also enlisted me to join their long-distance faculty to teach an online News University course called “Reporting Across Cultures, Writing About Differences.” That online course has involved journalists from the United Kingdom, Zambia, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and the Americas among others.
And just last week I was at Columbia University in New York City for the 10th annual “Let’s Do It Better” workshop on the coverage of race and ethnicity. During that time, we listened to reporters, editors, producers and photographers talk about their work as “case studies” in covering minorities and people of color. We also discussed Columbia’s plans to establish an International Center for Journalism, Race, Ethnicity and Gender at the university in hopes of encouraging more outstanding works of journalism around the world when it comes to reporting on people of color and other minorities.
There is a past to this subject. There is currency to this topic. There is a future for this coverage. That is why I am so excited to be here today because such reporting will always be with us, will always be important.
Some twenty years ago I was writing stories in the Los Angeles Times about police sweeps of undocumented immigrants and how there was a move to make Los Angeles a sanctuary city for those in the U.S. illegally. Today, those sweeps are still taking place, only under a different administration and under a federal agency with a different name.
During the 2000 presidential election in the U.S., I wrote an essay in a publication called the Media Studies Journal on “Why Race Still Matters” in the presidential election.
Now eight years later, we have a presidential candidate, Barack Obama, who may become the first black and the first biracial commander-in-chief in the White House. Not surprisingly, race has become an issue in the campaign despite Obama’s efforts to defuse the issue. His pastor’s comments have led to Obama’s repudiation of him and a public examination of black churches that tout a liberation theology. Even Obama’s childhood stay at a Muslim school here in Indonesia and his middle name Hussein have been raised by some of his critics trying to tie him to so-called “radical Islam.”
So the issues of race and religion and our differences have long been with us and will continue to be there. We need to recognize that.
As journalists we do bear some responsibility for the wrongful depiction of people, for advancing stereotypes, for fueling tensions, for marginalizing groups and adding to the public perception that many have. Too many times, we inflame rather than inform.
But we also have enlightened readers, informed listeners, deepened the knowledge of viewers about minorities – sometimes at great cost to our professional and personal life.
We just need to do more enlightening and to be more enlightened, which will be a challenge at a time when American newsrooms – and perhaps your own – are shrinking in staff, where resources are dwindling and the commitment at the top from some news organizations for in-depth news is seemingly on the wane. In too many places, investigative reporting, enterprise stories and international coverage have been cut back by media more interested in celebrity coverage than cerebral coverage, more star-struck by the powerful than worried over the poverty-stricken.
Now is the time for an even greater understanding of global issues and serious journalism that crosses borders, spans oceans and has a worldwide impact. We need to pay more and not less attention to what drives us apart and what keeps us together. We need to work at ways to tell more telling stories.
In part we do this by talking extensively to one another, by engaging in frank discussions, by immersing ourselves in a global dialogue – like this one you began three years ago and that continues this week. We need to translate those discussions into action. And we need to promote a global-local connection.
That’s why I am grateful to be here and am excited by your invitation. I look forward to exchanging ideas, sharing thoughts and finding common ground to assist our journalism – both collectively and individually.
Thank you again for inviting me. Thank you for embracing me – figuratively if not literally – with your warm welcome. And I can envision these conversations continuing well past our departure from this beautiful island. I certainly hope so.
Teríma kasih.
Thank you.
Senior Fellow, University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, Los Angeles, California
Special Projects Editor and Reporter for reznet news (a Web site for news about Native American issues), at www.reznetnews.org