Will Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s endorsement of Senator Barack Obama sway Irish-Americans? What about The Irish Voice’s endorsement of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton? Could Mr. Obama become a household name among Chinese-American voters? Will American relations with Russia and Pakistan affect immigrant voters here? And can any Republican contender distance himself from Bush administration policies in the eyes of Arab-Americans?
These questions have not figured high — or figured at all — on televised debates and in the mainstream media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. But they are being asked in New York City, which is not only a media capital, but also the ethnic media capital, host to about 200 periodicals and broadcast outlets in dozens of languages — including Bengali, Tagalog, Dari, Latvian, Yiddish, Malayalam and Hungarian.
These ethnic media outlets have been intensely attentive to the presidential competition, not only because it is the most competitive presidential race in decades, but also because American foreign policy and immigration reform are also headline issues that resonate with their audiences. With an eye cast here and another overseas, a group of ethnic media reporters participated in a radio project called Feet in Two Worlds and went to New Hampshire last month to cover the primaries. City Room interviewed five of those journalists as well as other ethnic media journalists on how the campaign is being covered in their communities.
Perhaps the most impressive effort is being put out by the Spanish-language ImpreMedia chain, which was freshly formed during the last campaign cycle from a merger and now expanded to a combined circulation of 10 million weekly. This election cycle, the media chain is embedding six reporters with various campaigns, covering Super Tuesday from seven battleground states, and doing its own extensive polling of Hispanic voters.
“In the history of ethnic media, there has been no comparable level of coverage as what we are providing for this election,” said Alberto Vourvoulias Bush, editor of El Diario/La Prensa, one of the publications in the 11-newspaper chain.
Arguably, ImpreMedia is devoting more resources to the election than many mainstream English publications. In December, ImpreMedia conducted a poll of Hispanic voters and identified the war in Iraq, immigration and the economy as the top issues. “Because of those three things, we realized that sometime back this election would take place under a heightened awareness and heightened interest,” Mr. Vourvoulias said. “We decided to commit to commit extra resources to campaign coverage and to provide world class coverage of their readers.”
Among topics that the chain is paying close attention to: the drug war in Mexico and the question of driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, which caused Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to stumble in October, when she clarified her position. But above all, perhaps the major concern in the ethnic press is immigration reform. “For us, it’s not a border security or national security issue. It’s a daily life issue,” Mr. Vourvoulias said.
Taisheng Won, editor in chief of the Chinese-language World Journal, which has a circulation of 70,000 in the New York metropolitan region and 300,000 nationwide, agreed. “Immigration is our priority, our top concern,” he said. He said the newspaper was following candidates’ position on immigration policy very closely. “If they say something on the immigration issue, we will take it from A.P., Reuters or A.F.P.,” he said, referring to The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, two leading wire services.
Kazi Shamsul Hoque, the editor of Akhon Samoy, a Bangladeshi newspaper based in New York City, said his readers, many who are undocumented, are following the candidates closely on the issue. “We actually studied their positions on the Internet,” he said. “We are listening to their speeches. We are in favor of giving some kind of legality to undocumented people.”
As Mr. Hoque’s comments suggest, the line between news coverage and editorial advocacy is not always sharply drawn in the immigrant press. And not all ethnic news outlets necessarily favor leniency for undocumented workers.
Many Armenian-Americans are second- or fourth-generation, and thus, “Armenians generally vote just like any Americans,” said Chris Zakian, the managing editor of the English-language Armenian Reporter. (In fact, Mark Krikorian, the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization that promotes stricter immigration enforcement, is of Armenian descent.)
But one issue that resonates with the Armenian-American community is the long-running fight to obtain Congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, which many presidential candidates have take positions on — whatever that may mean later on. “They are reassuring, friendly and certainly encouraging, but I think Armenians has become skeptical of the translation of a candidate policy later on,” Mr. Zakian said.
Foreign policy positions can take on an stronger resonance for ethnic communities that still maintain ties to home. For example, when Mr. Obama said in a major foreign policy speech in August that he would take a harder stance on Pakistan — and suggested a willingness to bomb the country — it became the lead story in the Pakistani press, both overseas and locally.
“The moment he gave these remarks about Pakistan, it was reported by the U.S. media and electronic media — those reports were picked up immediately by Pakistani media in Pakistan,” said Mohsin Zaheer, editor of The Weekly Sada-e-Pakistan, a Pakistani periodical based out of New York. Thanks to satellite television, those channels were also broadcast back in the United States. “Those words spread immediately. Within one hour, everyone knew,” he said.
“After these remarks, we covered the reaction of the Pakistani community,” he said. “There was a demonstration outside a fund-raising event of Barack Obama in Chicago. We got widespread coverage of these demonstrations on our front page.”
“The American policy has immediate consequences on the very existence of the Arab and Muslim community,” said Mohrez El Hussini, publisher of Al-Manassah Al-Arabeyah, an Arabic language publication based in New Jersey.
“The community that are most concerned with the war on terror is not the Chinese or the Greeks; it’s the Middle Easterners,” said Antoine Faisal, the publisher of Aramaica, an Arab-language biweekly with a circulation of 30,000. “Even though we are still in the primaries, many from our community are trying to tune in to find out what kind of message,what kind of communication are the candidates doing toward the Arab world.”
Fairly or not, Mrs. Clinton is strongly associated with the foreign policies of her husband’s eight-year presidency in the minds of many immigrants. That helped her draw the endorsement from The Irish Voice, which noted she “was with her husband every step of the way during his intervention in the Irish peace process, without which there would never have been the successful resolution that we’re currently witnessing in Northern Ireland.”
And the Clinton administration’s support of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti, to reclaim his presidency in 1994, is still remembered by the Haitian immigrant community in New York. “Some of them are very pro-Clinton and some of them are very anti-Clinton,” said Ricot Dupuy, the general manager of Radio Soleil, a Haitian radio station with about 200,000 listeners. “The Aristide factor is the determining factor for that.”
And among other groups, Mrs. Clinton’s association with her president is even more simple: name recognition.
“Americans are loyal to political parties. Chinese are not. They vote for the candidate they know,” said Lotus Chau, reporter for the Chinese-language newspaper Sing Tao Daily. “Between Hillary Clinton and Obama, they’ll definitely vote for Hillary Clinton.” Why? “Because she was first lady. And she went to China.”
The Bush administration’s foreign policies will likely affect whichever Republican candidate wins the nomination. The war on terror isi “an exodus from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party” among Arab-Americans, both Muslim and Christian, “and that has to do with the guilt-by-association mentality that has taken hold in the past years,” said Mr. Faisal, publisher of Aramaica.
The feeling also permeates New York’s Pakistanis, who “feel as if they have been unjustly victimized since 9/11,” said Jehangir Khattak, a contributor for the English-language newspapers Pakistan News, which is published in New York, and Dawn, which is based in Pakistan. Because of President Bush’s close support of the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, “the general consensus among the Pakistani communities of this country is that if a Republican candidate is elected, there will be more years of Musharraf, which means more years of an undemocratic democracy,” Mr. Khattak said.
Under the same notion, Russian-Americans are paying close attention to what the candidates say about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and, for different reasons, about Israel, since many of the Russians who live in New York are Jewish, said Ari Kagan, senior editor of Vecherniy New York, a weekly Russian-language newspaper in Brooklyn.
“I recall in 2004 that one of the reasons the Russian community voted for George Bush over John Kerry was that they perceived George Bush as a much closer friend of Israel,” he said. “But if the candidates praise Putin, like Bush has done, they will not be very popular with most of the Russians here.”
Major issues in the race — like the Iraq war, the economy and health care — are scrutinized through different prisms. The war in Iraq has greater, more personal significance among Hispanics voters than the overall population because of the large number of Latinos in the armed forces, said Mr. Vourvoulias of El Diario/La Prensa. The poll found that about half of Hispanic voters wanted the troops to come back now and just under half knew someone who is serving in Iraq. “This is an issue that affects Hispanics in a life and death sort of way,” he said.
The Haitian community pays especially close attention to the health care policies, since many of them are among the 47 million uninsured Americans, said Mr. Dupuy or Radio Soleil, the radio station.
And Russians are unhappy about how expensive the food imported from Europe and sold in local stores has become since the dollar has dropped in value against the euro, Vecherniy New York said.
One topic that unites nearly all the ethnic media outlets, no matter what political outlook, is the importance of getting their audiences to vote in the most contested American presidential election in over a generation. And ethnic media outlets are playing a much more service-oriented role in the lives of their audiences.
The Polish Daily News published a voter registration guide with dates, addresses and Web sites, said Czeslaw Karkowski, its editor. “We just inserted it into our newspaper.”
The Korean Central Daily News has done a number of articles explaining why they should vote on this primary and general election. “Even a vote from immigrants can count,” said Steve Chong, a reporter there.
The immigration debates have helped galvanize the ethnic communities around the election, Mr. Vourvoulias said. “It heightened awareness of the political process and the importance of the political process.”
Jennifer 8. Lee contributed reporting. Read more Primary Journal blog entries from the New York region.
