Poll Gauges Vietnamese Americans’ View of Media
Too much emphasis on food, festivals and crime
By Jason Ma

A majority of Vietnamese Americans in Little Saigon say stories in the English-language media in Southern California focus too much on food, festivals and crime, according to a poll released April 19.

Of the 418 respondents to the poll, 60 percent said there was too much emphasis on crime and festivals, like Tet, in English-language media coverage of the Vietnamese American community. Another 59 percent responded that the media focus too much on “the uniqueness of our food.”

Researchers at California State University Fullerton conducted the poll among Vietnamese American adults living in Orange County, mostly in Westminster, Calif. The margin of error was plus or minus 5 percent.

Funded by the Ford Foundation, the poll’s purpose was to help journalists better understand the communities they cover, particularly minority communities, according to Prof. Edgar Trotter.

Professors Jeffery Brody, Tony Rimmer and Trotter analyzed stories that ran in the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register between 1985 and 1998 and determined that, indeed, there was evidence of skewed coverage of the Vietnamese American community.

Of the 890 stories they found that mentioned “Little Saigon” at least twice, 585 also mentioned the words “food,” “festival,” or “crime” or other terms related to criminal justice. And 407 out of 667 stories that mentioned “Vietnamese community” at least twice also carried one of the same string of words.

“Generally, I would agree with that,” attorney Van Thai Tran said. “But the local newspapers are trying their best at branching out and diversifying. I would give them some credit, at least in the last two years.”

Widely regarded as a leader in the Vietnamese American community, Tran sits on the Garden Grove planning commission and is considering a November run for a seat on the city council there.

“The media, when covering minority communities has a tendency to stereotype,” said Brody, who covered the Vietnamese American community at the Register from 1984 to 1993. “It becomes convenient to write about festivals…food. And crime has been a staple of coverage, especially Vietnamese gangs.”

Like Tran, Brody said he has noticed an effort by both papers to hire more Vietnamese American reporters. Nevertheless, Brody expressed concern over a story in the April 24 issue of the Register about that paper’s food writer reporting on local cuisine from Vietnam.

Tran said the poll’s results do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of the rest of the community, since the population is changing so fast and those polled live mainly in Little Saigon—the first stop for most recent immigrants.

“You’re shooting at a moving target going 100 miles per hour,” he said.

These factors are reflected in the somewhat contradictory results. For example, while 70 percent of respondents said the English-language media too often show Vietnamese Americans wearing traditional clothes, 57 percent also said that, overall, the portrayal of the community is accurate.

The average number of years that respondents have been in the United States was 11.8 years and 51 percent of them immigrated in the 1980s or 1990s though United Nations-sponsored programs or bilateral humanitarian agreements between the United States and Vietnam. The median age of the sample was 41.5.

Because Vietnamese Americans in other, more affluent parts of Orange County were not surveyed, Tran thinks that the median household income reported in the poll (between $20,000 and $25,000) and the share of those identifying themselves as more Vietnamese than American (93 percent) could be significantly different for the overall community.

The poll also asked participants for their views on free speech. According to the poll, 56 percent said Communists should not be allowed to speak in public, and a third said Vietnamese-language media should not do negative stories about the community.

Moreover, while 96 percent said they enjoy their civil liberties in the United States, 87 percent also said there is too much freedom here.

Brody said the apparent paradox over free speech is largely attributable to many Vietnamese Americans’ strong anti-communist views, as demonstrated by the protests last year over the displaying of Communist leader Ho Chi Min’s picture in a Little Saigon video store.

“That’s understandable considering that they’re refugees,” Brody said. “They still have strong family attachments to their homeland. They have strong visceral attachments.”