Ethnic Media Services And California Black Media Unite 150 Media Outlets In An Expo

The Ethnic Media Services and California Black Media together hosted a two-day conference and Expo of ethnic media outlets in Sacramento, California on Aug. 27-28. The conference featured multiple panels with speakers who were lawmakers, academics, community organizers, and journalists. They discussed marginalized communities, challenges for ethnic media, how to cover community stories with sensitivity, climate crisis, and sustainability solutions, the role of AI in elections, and how to fight election disinformation.

Bridging Divides: Connecting Communities

In the opening lunch session, ‘Bridging Divides — Connecting Communities’, Keynote Speaker, Tony Thurmond , California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, spoke on ‘The Future of Education’. Addressing the twin issues of education and homelessness, Thurmond said, “Kids need homes”, and proposed building small homes on school sites across California as a possible solution to potentially reduce homelessness. He also proposed bringing a ban on cell phones in the classroom noting how scrolling on social media impacts the mental health of students.

Stop the Hate

The founders of the Stop the Hate Initiative spoke about the value of ethnic media collaboration with community-based organizations and strategies for sustaining the initiative.

“It [Stop the Hate] gave us the moral authority to say that anti-Asian hate is real, that racism does happen against our communities and that we need our lawmakers and our leaders to do something about it,” Andrew Wong, Managing Director of Advocacy at Chinese For Affirmative Action & Co-Founder of Stop the Hate said.

Wong explained that the initiative was born in the wake of the Atlanta spa shooting in 2021 , where eight people were killed, six of them Asian American women, and that had caused a groundswell within the community, as well as elected leaders across the country, including here in California, to try and start figuring out how to grapple with the issue.

Khydeeja Alam, Commissioner, the Commission on Asian Pacific Island American Affairs , spoke on the historic nature of the initiative, marking one of the first of its kind in the nation. While the work is not complete, significant progress has been made, she said, emphasizing that over 20,000 community members benefited from intervention, prevention, and legal aid services in the first year, and tens of thousands more have received other forms of support.

“We should be celebrating all the good work, our community members, our legislators, ethnic media, everyone has done to accomplish this,” Alam said.

The panel also highlighted the Department of Social Services’ efforts to ensure equitable access to services across California, particularly in response to the pandemic and a budget surplus that funded new programs. The department already had existing connections to the nonprofit network across California, which was crucial in the implementation of new programs during the pandemic.

“We want to make sure that there is equitable access to our services across the state, and that our programs are designed and informed with the voices of the communities that we are looking to serve,” said Eliana Kaimowitz, Director, Office of Equity, CA Dept. of Social Services . “So I can understand why this project came to the Department of Social Services.”

‘The goal is to have no hate crimes’: AG Rob Bonta

Attorney General Rob Bonta in conversation with Danny J. Bakewell Jr., Executive Editor of LA Sentinel about the Stop the Hate initiatives, said, “Our goal is to have no hate crimes. In California, we believe that everyone belongs. No one should be targeted, attacked, hurt or harmed because of who they are, where they’re from, how they look, who they love, and how they pray.”

Early in his term, Bonta witnessed a surge in hate crimes, particularly affecting the AAPI community and African Americans. In response, he established the Racial Justice Bureau to actively tackle hate groups, incidents, and crimes. Additionally, he organized a series of roundtable discussions with major city mayors and community leaders to address these concerns and take specific actions against racial injustice. Any decrease in hate crimes is positive, he said but emphasized the need to analyze the experiences of different groups.

Ethnic media panel

In the Ethnic Media Panel, reporters highlighted how they amplified the voices of those targeted by hate and documented the rise of rapid response networks. Mina Fedor, Founder, AAPI Youth Rising (ARY), emphasized the importance of addressing stereotypes and misconceptions through education. The organization focuses on promoting Asian voices through various mediums such as art, speech, and writing. “We’ve been here for centuries,” she said. “We’ve been here a very long time, and we belong here”, she said.

She noted that the impact of political hate on Asian American youth led to increased bullying and a mental health crisis. A survey conducted with 150 chapter leaders of ARY revealed significant incidents of hate and unsafe school environments, severely affecting the mental health of Asian American youth. On this panel were also youth speakers from high school who spoke about their experiences.

The homeless are not transient

Leslie Layton, Managing Editor at Chico Sol , spoke about homelessness and the harsh realities the homeless face, including theft, bullying, and violence. “Conservative elected leaders and groups on social media use a lot of derogatory language toward the homeless,” she said. “Our law enforcement agencies routinely refer to homeless people as transients, which some people consider derogatory. But it’s factually inaccurate because we know from county-led surveys that the majority of homeless people in our area are from the area itself. They’re not transient in any way.”

Breaking cultural taboos

On Day 2 of the Expo, in the session Breaking Cultural Taboos, reporters shared stories, challenges, and experiences in cultural coverage, more specifically covering taboos in their own communities. The engaging discussion was moderated by Jaya Padmanabhan, Editor, USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.

Jia H Jung of AsAm News spoke about her experiences interviewing women within the Taiwanese community speaking about the “bad mother” taboo, “normalization of suffering” and “intergenerational trauma from the genocide in Cambodia (Khmer Rouge), which affected the second and the third generation descendants of the time”, she said.

Fireside chat with State Treasurer Fiona Ma

California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, the keynote speaker, spoke about state initiatives for certified small businesses, and other programs like CalSavers which extends to independent gig workers and contractors. Ma strongly urged small businesses to get certified to be able to access the various financial programs offered by the state to boost the small business economy. However, notably, after three years of a budget surplus, the state has a budget deficit and needs to fall back on the “rainy day” fund of $36 billion.

Climate change, deep fakes, and Props on the ballot

Other breakout sessions included one on the environment and another on propositions on the ballot in the forthcoming elections and one on racialized disinformation. The environment panel, moderated by Jon Christensen, of the Institute of Environment and Sustainability, UCLA, and featuring speakers Manuel Ortiz Escamez from Peninsula 360, Sissy Trinh of the South Asian Community Alliance, and Yvette Lopez Ledesma of Wilderness Society, focused on addressing the climate crisis through urban greening and how ethnic media could participate in initiatives to promote sustainability solutions.

In the session, The Growing Threat of Racialized Disinformation, the panelists discussed various ways in which journalists and media outlets could fight racialized as well as election-related disinformation, and fact-check news and information effectively especially in the era of deep-fakes and AI.

India Currents wins EMS Award

EMS also celebrated ethnic media organizations across the state with an awards ceremony honoring community and multicultural journalism with the 2024 California and Ethnic Media Awards. India Currents’ writer Ritu Marwah won the award in the category Making it in California for her story on the undocumented farmworkers.

Together we make an impact

Sandy Close, Director EMS, called for ethnic media to come together and make its presence felt among the decision-makers in Sacramento. “The point is to become visible to the decision makers in government in business in the communications industry in the nonprofit and philanthropic spaces. We exist…the vibrancy of ethnic media, its resilience and its determination to serve audiences not reached by general market media is so impressive and we need to come together to send that message. We all reach diverse audiences and when we work together we represent media that reach at least half of California”, Close said.

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