nwasianweekly.com
May 12, 2007

Photo by Rebecca Ip

Members of the Vietnamese community protested outside the Northwest Asian Weekly’s offices in 2004. They were upset with an editorial the paper wrote.

What’s the best advice for a publisher?

By Assunta Ng
Northwest Asian Weekly

Editor’s note: This is part seven in a continuing series by the publisher of the Northwest Asian Weekly and Seattle Chinese Post. The newspapers are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year.

Double standards in the Asian community

“You are not a newspaper if you try to please everyone,” attorney Charles Herrmann told me a decade ago.

What Herrmann meant was that the Northwest Asian Weekly should live by its principles and not worry if the content of its paper offends certain readers.

Anytime we are faced with a challenge, we return to our guiding principles as an ethnic community newspaper: Are the facts true? Is the story fair? Will it empower the Asian community? Are we providing a voice for our diverse community, which consists of immigrants, American-borns and many other people of varying viewpoints and backgrounds? Does it develop understanding between the Asian community and other communities, including the mainstream and other ethnic groups?

If the conflict we encounter meets any one of these objectives, we proceed without fear.

People have told me that it must take a lot of courage to start a newspaper. I’ve learned that it takes a lot more courage to tell the truth and speak our mind without sugarcoating our words. Of course we have experienced the cold shoulder, hate mail, opposition and disgruntled calls in our 25 years of existence. That is the nature of the newspaper business.

What makes it even tougher is that I manage not one, but two demanding newspapers, the Seattle Chinese Post and the Northwest Asian Weekly. Doing so could mean more controversies and crises for us. I am not surprised that we get blamed more often than other Asian newspapers do, as we have taken more risks to report the truth.

Actually, it’s unfair to say that I never receive credit. I do. Just as I become disillusioned and frustrated, strangers, both Asian and non-Asian, walk up to me and shower me with praise and encouragement.

I don’t exactly know why Sen. Maria Cantwell honored me with the Woman of Valor award in 2006. But if speaking the truth was one of her reasons, I couldn’t be more grateful for this recognition. Every time we publish the truth, we face harsh consequences. In this small community, our readers are also our advertisers. Their weapon for revenge is to cancel their subscription and advertisement, the lifeblood of newspapers.

The truth is not welcome

Years ago, an advertiser called my uncle to beg me not to print a story in the Seattle Chinese Post about a robbery in his store. We didn’t comply. Naturally, we lost a reader and an advertiser. I doubt he has ever forgiven me; he didn’t talk to me for a decade.

Another person wanted to keep us from writing a negative article about his business, even though the Seattle Post-Intelligencer already printed the story. I refunded all of his prepaid advertisements. He was upset with me for years. Of course, he didn’t show his rage to the P-I! It’s a double standard that this little paper must bear the brunt of the anger.

Controversy arose recently when the U.S. labor department began announcing that some Asian restaurants were not paying minimum wage and overtime to their employees. It instantly put us in the hot seat. Last year, we printed the outcome of one such case against a local restaurant. The restaurateur was so upset that he canceled his advertisement the next day. He thought we were being unfair because the labor department had also investigated other Asian restaurants and sent us notices of those violations. Our policy is to print the verdict when a restaurant is found to have violated the law, not when a complaint or lawsuit is filed. All restaurants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Yes, we might be 25 years old, but our relationship with some members of the Asian community has been stormy at times.

The truth is not welcomed by the community in many instances. Usually the community is receptive only if we portray them in a positive light. Anytime our Asian readers disapprove of what they read in our papers, they take it personally. “How dare you!” is their mentality. Reporting the truth, to many in the community, is about “losing face.”

One time, we wrote in the Chinese Post that many Chinese community members who fund-raised for gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire couldn’t say her name. Isn’t it embarrassing to have Gregoire and her husband sitting at the head table and listening to dinner organizers pronounce their name 10 different ways on stage?

If the Asian Weekly only acknowledged the good things about this community, it would affect our readers’ ability to distinguish merits from errors, facts from lies and fiction, objectivity from subjectivity, and reality from illusion. What good is a newspaper if we shun improvement and innovation but foster hypocrisy instead!

Take the Korean community, for instance. Several years ago, we wrote about Korean events never starting on time, and when they finally do start, they always begin with a lengthy introduction of all the community leaders in the room. It goes on for so long that sometimes dinner isn’t served until 9 p.m.! Some Korean community members might still be pissed to this day. Immigrants have to learn that America guarantees freedom of speech in its Constitution. We are protected by the First Amendment. We are not required to ask permission to express our feelings and thoughts.

I am proud to say that the Korean community is now one of the most organized and politically savvy ethnic groups in this state. It has created many programs and organizations that serve not only Koreans but also build bridges with the mainstream community, like the Korean American Voters Alliance.

Vietnamese community’s protest

The same uproar happened with the Vietnamese American community. Some people protested us in 2004 after we published an editorial telling Vietnamese community members to move on and put the past behind them. Their experiences with the communists in Vietnam only brought them pain. Our point was: Don’t let the painful past consume you; move on so that you are free to build a better community and a better future for yourself and the next generation. After a Vietnamese-language paper reported what we printed, some in the older generation became outraged.

But many members of the younger generation told us quietly, “We agree with your editorial.” A few even told us that they were pressured to sign a protest letter.

Three months later, The Seattle Times wrote an editorial saying the Vietnamese community should be realistic and accept the flag of the current communist Vietnamese regime. The federal government recognizes communist Vietnam, the paper pointed out, and so should the Vietnamese American community. You would think The Seattle Times received countless pieces of hate mail and protest calls.

Wrong!

The Times editorialist who wrote that column told me he did not receive a single call! Not even one letter of criticism! Yet the editorial we wrote got more angry responses than we ever imagined due to an organized letter-writing campaign. Although some letters offered no logical reasons, we printed every one.

Five days later, they e-mailed us to say they would protest at our door.

Here we go again — a double standard!

I think the protesters were hostile towards me because I am a woman and a Chinese who is bold and unafraid to speak her mind. Perhaps they thought I would be scared and beg for mercy. Perhaps it’s jealousy for being the only Asian American newspaper in the state to have the guts to say what we said. No Vietnamese papers dared to say the same. If they did, they would face threats, including boycotts and maybe even violence, like the kind one Los Angeles Vietnamese newspaper endured.

Perhaps they thought I didn’t understand how much they suffered at the hands of the communists. Believe me, I do. My grandparents, parents and relatives went through the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and communist China’s purge in the 1950s and ’60s.

Perhaps they were even more annoyed that the editor of the Northwest Asian Weekly is of Vietnamese descent and she, too, was convinced that’s the way it should be! What sparked the protest could have been a combination of all these elements. Who knows?

Why nothing happened at The Times

The Times editorialist viewed the protest in a different way. He said the community members felt stronger emotions towards the Asian Weekly than The Times because they feel ownership in the community paper, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As journalists, we recognize that any response from our readers is better than no response. If you told me a quarter-century ago when I started the papers that they could stir up so much heated emotions, I would not have believed you. The press is indeed powerful.

About 20 Vietnamese demonstrators gathered outside our offices to protest the editorial. This is the beauty of America: You don’t need a permit to stage a protest. We never confronted them. Our photographer even invited them to pose for some pictures. Part of me was curious to see how big the crowd was, and how it ended. I am a writer. Anything that happens to me not only makes me stronger, but also serves as material for my future writing and reflections.

My staff asked if I wanted to cancel a meeting with 10 Rainbow Bookfest volunteers that had already been scheduled for the same time as the protest.

“No,” I said. “I want things to be normal.” As the meeting went on inside, one staff member went outside to take photos of the protesters.

The protest organizers called up other Asian media to cover the event and to try to make us look bad. To their surprise, the protest got prominent coverage in the Northwest Asian Weekly and the Seattle Chinese Post. To us, the protest was news. Someone from another Chinese paper told me that he did not want to write about the protest because whatever happens to us could happen to his paper too.

Two Asian papers carried the story. The Chinese-language paper interviewed me and quoted me accurately, while the English-language one never called me and misled readers into thinking it did. Furthermore, that paper’s headline was something like “Ng’s paper protested …”

That’s exactly my point: They don’t see me as the Northwest Asian Weekly, but as Assunta Ng.

When I shared with my son the coverage of other papers, he said, “Mom, you should thank them for the publicity.” Together, mother and son burst into laughter!

I didn’t just leave the Vietnamese community out there feeling cold and bitter about the incident. Two months after the protest, I invited five representatives from the community to our office to chat.

The goal of the meeting was to exchange views about our differences, but one member of the group misunderstood. He prepared a letter of apology for us to print in the paper. Although I flatly said, “No,” the meeting was cordial and we agreed to disagree.

An editorial reflects the position of a newspaper, and a lot of thoughts are explored before the piece is published. We don’t change our views easily and hastily in an editorial. Readers can reject our thinking through the letters and commentaries they send in. We appreciate diverse opinions and do our best to publish as many as possible. We apologize for factual errors in our stories, but not for the viewpoints we take in our editorials. We welcome readers who call to offer further discussion of our opposing viewpoints. We are always willing to listen, no matter how busy we are.

But we stand by our editorials.

In two weeks: Should the Northwest Asian Weekly take sides?

Assunta Ng can be reached at assunta@nwasianweekly.com.

Send correspondence to:
Northwest Asian Weekly • P.O. Box 3468 • Seattle • WA  98114
Tel: 206.223.5559 •  Fax: 206.223.0626 • Email: info@nwasianweekly.com
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