It's Designed to Break Your Heart (Feature) More Work to be Done, Says AAJA (in National News) Peoples' Victory Celebration (in Bay Area News) Get Ready for Cyberwars (in Business) Ironman (in Sports) Fade to Black With Auteur Wayne Wang (in A&E) It Takes Courage in This Business (in Opinion)

It Takes Courage in This Business

By Christopher Chow

It’s known as “The Business” among insiders, the practitioners of journalism in the mass media industry. This past week while the Hyatt Regency Hotel housed the 14th Annual National Convention of the Asian American Journalists Association, celebrating its 20th year of life, it was business as usual.

But with a brutal twist — there are no jobs to be had, especially if you’re Asian American, new, or serious about fulfilling the journalistic mission: to defend and promote a free and just society through the power of information and ideas. Worse yet, the AAJA conducted no serious business, did not discuss lessons learned, and enacted no resolutions or recommendations for the future.

One of the inherent problems of the AAJA convention is its aping of the industry and the organizations it supposedly seeks to change — by schmoozing, I mean, networking. Job fairs and one-on-one critiques with alleged recruiters and headhunters sitting in front of TV/VCR combos tell you how good or bad your sample reel looks and the wonderful potential opportunities they offer (but are not offering to you).

Young “yellow” journalists today are like the “neo-Mandarins” of Asian America being “thrown into the Roman arena” says K.W. Lee, a 73-year-old Korean American pioneer journalist and four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. His 40-plus years in mainstream newspapers from West Virginia and the East Coast to California give him the perspective of wisdom and experience. He reminds us that when the “media honchos of LA Times and the television networks” pitted Koreans and blacks against each other in a manufactured race war in south central Los Angeles (1992), no one from AAJA spoke up for the Korean Americans, except for one Bill Wong, then a columnist with the Oakland Tribune, and now occasionally for the San Francisco Chronicle. We are meat for the media.

From the conference’s beginning, unease was in the air. Tritia Toyota, the first Asian American woman TV news reporter and anchor in Los Angeles and co-founder of AAJA, had been invited as a special guest. She declined. She’s no longer in the business. Some say she feels AAJA has lost its way, that it is no longer trying to fulfill its original mission of fighting stereotypical media images and protecting journalists. Bill Sing, another co-founder, gave the convention keynote speech at the national awards luncheon. Rumor had it that he was reluctant to accept the honor. Sing named some of the pioneers and leading practitioners: Connie Chung, the first Asian American anchor on a network evening news; Ken Kashiwahara, former ABC News correspondent; and Bill Wong, the newspaper pioneer. But they were not in attendance either. In his address, Sing summed up the substantial accomplishments of AAJA, but warned, “Friends, we still have a long way to go. Look around, how many Asian American publishers of mainstream newspapers and magazines are here in the house? … How much influence do we really have? If a TV station fires its Asian American anchor or fails to have on-air talent that reflects the diversity of its community, can we do anything about it?”

If AAJA can get the Hearst-owned Chronicle, Daimler-Chrysler, CBS, and other corporate giants to pay for the shuttle buses, tote bags, cameras, computers and Web sites to stage this convention, why can’t AAJA be a credible voice in the industry?

The serious part of the convention — the workshop panels, the plenary sessions, where the pros gather to discuss latest trends and how to elevate their work — did not make news. Ted Fang, the first Asian American publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper in the continental United States, had no role other than to speak at the opening plenary on Media, Technology, and the New Millennium before a desultory crowd of 200 out of nearly 1,000 registered conventioneers.

AAJA has a good administrative staff. They’ve shown they can organize and run conventions and provide professional services. But they are not policy advocates nor authorized by the membership to lobby policy-makers and decision-makers in the industry or government. AAJA has no on-going high- or low-level relationships with OCA, JACL, AALDEF, to name a few national advocacy organizations. If AAJA could put the voice and weight of its membership and allies behind a policy recommendation or stance on an issue, then when it speaks, people might listen.

Wendy Tokuda, co-founder of the San Francisco AAJA chapter, and a top Bay Area news anchor, had tears in her eyes following the Special Recognition Award given to the Woodwards of Bainbridge Island, outside of Seattle, Washington for continuing to publish news of Japanese American families who had been evacuated to internment camps in the Bainbridge Review. Paul Ohtaki, one of the “Camp Correspondents” hired by the Woodwards, spoke of asking them, “‘Why did you do this, why suffer the anger and hate and ugliness of some of your readers?’ They would always reply, this was the right thing to do.”

Wendy departed from script and ad-libbed, “What strikes me, in listening to Paul talk about it, is the kind of courage it took to speak at that time, to speak out at all. And what strikes me as a reporter, and a reporter of Asian American descent, is … any of you who were working in the newsroom at the time that the American jet was sitting on Hainan Island, would know ... a lot of those feelings about being different — and making a difference. I think that you have sense of the work that we have yet to do.”

Afterwards, Sam Chu Lin, pioneering broadcaster and contributor to AsianWeek, asked Wendy what she was really saying to her fellow AAJA members. She answered, “That it takes courage to tell the truth. That it takes courage to be different. It takes courage to manage it, to handle it in the newsroom, in terms of news judgment. It’s hard to have a minority opinion.”

You gotta have heart, or the business will crush you.

Christopher Chow is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who in 1970 broke the yellow color line in San Francisco commercial television. He now works in administration at Central City Hospitality House in the Tenderloin community.