Who Wants to Fight Big Media?
September 24, 2007
Watching the Emmys, I rooted for nerdy Heroes star Masi Oka, the new face of Asian American maleness, in his quest for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama.
The guy is so hot (in that nerdy Asian American way); he even has a milk mustache ad. (There goes the ozone layer. Don’t they know we’re lactose intolerant?)
I was in Los Angeles earlier in the week talking with Guy Aoki, the longtime media activist and founder of Media Action Network for Asian Americans. Aoki was touting Masi’s prospects as a potentially groundbreaking event for Asian American males.
“If he wins, it’s going to be big,” Aoki said. We agreed it would be a real departure from the stereotypical images that have dominated American pop culture.
But as we all know now, Masi’s victory wasn’t to be.
Instead, the best stereotype buster on the Emmys was the censorship of Sally Field by Fox for her use of the F-word in an anti-war acceptance speech. Said the former Gidget star: “Let’s face it; if mothers ruled the (world), there would be no (expletive) wars in the first place.”
I guess Fox would have preferred a reprise of “You like me. You really like me.” They probably would’ve even gone for “You f—ing like me. You really f––ing like me.” Just no anti-Fox News war rhetoric. Not while Ryan Seacrest is host.
Kudos to Field, who after all the years proves that the Flying Nun really has a set of bao. That’s more than any Asian American male on television these days.
What hurt more was when Masi was given face time as a presenter for the tech award.
A tech award? Is that because it is a scientific fact that all Asians are so tech-oriented we have binary code in our DNA?
Why not make the tech award presenter Kanye West? And then they could have Masi go up in a rap battle against Fifty Cent as “Fifty Yen.” No one’s thinking out of the take-out box these days.
So, instead of a big victory last Sunday, our man Masi was just being used to further the same old stereotype of the Asian American male: nerdy, high-tech and sexless.
Did you catch the text crawl on the E! Channel about Masi having a 180 IQ but no girlfriend?
The potential breakthrough was a bust, used to confirm the stereotypical.
Not a lot of progress here. My recent trip to L.A. only confirmed that.
WELCOME TO L.A.
Tritia Toyota told me to shut up. You don’t tell an amok to shut up.
But because she is still the beautiful former Asian American anchorwoman turned traveling Ph.D. academic (who, for my money, is Connie Chung squared), I submitted to her.
I can’t help that I’m passionate about Asian Americans and the media, the topic of a panel discussion last week at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.
The discussion was part of an Asian Pacific Islander Criminal Justice Teaching Seminar, sponsored by the Japanese American Bar Association, the Philippine American Bar Association, the South Asian Bar Association and the Southern California Chinese Lawyers Association.
The lawyers’ focus was racial profiling and selective prosecution, and how the media plays a role in that. But as the panel revealed, the media forms and shapes the stereotypes in our culture, and the law is just a part of that.
The discussion seemed so oddly retro. Haven’t we been talking about this for all these years? We have.
And that’s why I told the group, “I’m all for recycling, just not when it comes to Asian American issues.”
The fact is we already have a network that serves as watchdogs of the media and will call the major players on transgressions.
We just don’t have the infrastructure, nor the monetary support, to keep up a full-court press to make sure habitual offenders are taken to task and forced to make amends.
I’m not talking about AAJA.
HERE’S A SOLUTION
The Media Action Network for Asian Americans has been at the forefront in tackling media sins for as long as I can remember.
It could be more effective with major community support. I was surprised to learn that MANAA is all-volunteer and exists solely on a handful of donations to do its work of beating down the networks. That’s an embarrassment.
The mistake people make is any reliance on AAJA. You can’t be a credible watchdog if you take money from the media groups you oversee. Sounds too much like a protection racket.
What’s needed is a new coalition effort of APA watchdogs who can work together.
Anyone want to be a part of that? Anyone want to fund that?
All it would take is one of those rich lawyers at that Los Angeles teach-in, or anyone anyplace else with the wherewithal to step forward.
Otherwise, you can bet we’ll be recycling these issues for another generation or two.
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6 Responses to “Who Wants to Fight Big Media?”
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she said “goddamn” war… not f—ing war.
fyi
Just watched Masi Oka’s presentation on YouTube. Thank goodness they didn’t mention the fact that Masi Oka for Industrial Light & Magic as a digital artist for eight years. That would have really pushed it over the edge.
Point being — perhaps they chose Masi Oka to do the tech award because he was the most qualified presenter…?
Dear Emil:
Gee, I had begun to hope that you had reached the point of no return with all this hype and all this glitz.
Bottom line is that NONE of it really impinges on our daily lives, other than the financial that is.
Buying into the Gollywood syndrome is buying into the quaint notion that the Bush Dynasty is anything but banal Yankee privilege, something Sidney Blumenthal recently dissected as a tale of a spoiled brat who is also an infantile Fuehrer of his own madness.
Buying into Oscars and Emmys and Tonys and such is buying into the Big Lie of “western” lack of culture.
Who needs it? Not us. Not so long as they refrain from putting ALL of us in “relocation” centers. For our own “safety,” of course.
Meanwhile, the name of the game is smoke and mirrors, as in all those glam ad shots in Vanity Fair?
Harvard is no better than Yale. Or Columbia for that matter, and all of them are no better than their contributing alumni.
Frank Eng
P.S.: Connie and Tricia were but precursors of all those luscious Asian beauties reading “headlines” on all the cable channels. So, what’s “success” got to do with anything that really matters?
I’m 100% with Marisa on this one … if you knew his background … it makes sense … did they mention this fact though? Probably not …
This whole Masi thing made me think … is it wrong to have techy, geeky asian american male role models? Is Jerry Yang a bad role model? Is Masi Oka (actor / programmer / genius) a bad role model? Should we shun these people away into some kind of shame closet?
I was speaking with someone on the Asian Week staff about “Flavor of Love: Charm School” and (s)he was saying how it was good that Leilani was on that show. So is it good to have a high school drop out, single mother, stripper Asian American on national tv?
I see her point, that it dilutes the stereotype, but should we be celebrating people like her and shunning the intelligent ones who happen to slightly fall into the stereotype?
Jeff Yang has a few things to say about this at 2:10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHIi11HX0tE
Emil,
Why does Asian mean Almond eyes to you?
-FE