Amid Rise In Anti-Asian Hate, KTSF Keeps The Bay Area Informed

BRISBANE, CA — The headlines for the month of March on the website of KTSF, the Bay Area’s Chinese-language news station, reveal a timeline of seemingly never-ending local incidents of violence against Asian Americans.

On March 17 alone, the station led its 7 p.m. Cantonese newscast with stories of a Chinese man reportedly spit on while walking in San Francisco, another Asian American man attacked near the Civic Center, and an older Chinese person attacked in a laundry shop. The next day, San Francisco prosecutors filed charges following an assault on an Asian American Uber driver in his car, and an older Chinese woman was assaulted on the street.

The COVID-19 pandemic and racist inflammatory rhetoric by former President Donald Trump and others has spurred attacks against Asians and Asian Americans. Mainstream media around the country covered the rise in attacks, which reached an apex when a gunman murdered eight people in the Atlanta spa shootings on March 26, six of whom were Asian American women.

Brisbane-based KTSF has provided local newscasts in Cantonese and later Mandarin for Bay Area residents since 1989 and is the only station in the country with newscasts in both languages. It has been uniquely positioned to not only to speak to residents in their native language during a chaotic time but also to provide its viewers — including many older immigrants who don’t speak much English — with clear information and safety tips that they may not have received from English-language news media.

“Asian hate and violence is really not something new,” said Jack Schwartz, the general manager of KTSF. “It’s been going on for years. It just hasn’t been so much in the limelight as it has in the past year in the post-Trump era, where I feel like a lot of feelings that have been subjugated have been allowed to come out more into the open. And because of that, a lot of people are really scared. My staff is very aware of that because they’re Asian themselves.”

Schwartz took over KTSF last year after spending decades as the director of development at the local CBS affiliate. Schwartz, who is white, admits that “my Cantonese is nil and my Mandarin is yīdiăn [a bit].” But KTSF has nevertheless covered some of the more critical issues facing the Bay Area Chinese community, from the economic effects of the pandemic that ravaged businesses in San Francisco’s historic Chinatown to the onslaught of anti-Asian violence.

The 2.2 million Asian Americans residing in the Bay Area represent 30 percent of the region’s television market, according to KTSF's website. Chinese-speaking residents make up nearly a fifth of San Francisco’s population, according to a 2018 survey.

Chinese-language newscasts are a staple for the group of immigrants who settled in the Bay Area in the 1980s and 1990s, Schwartz said, as China underwent a political reckoning and the seeds of Silicon Valley began sprouting.

In its early days, KTSF secured a key interview in 1989 with a student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in China. It regularly airs news reports from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan and expanded its 7 p.m. newscast to an additional hour earlier this year to include international reports and keep immigrant viewers abreast of developments back home, especially regarding COVID-19. Unlike the recent “second wave” of immigrants who are more comfortably bilingual, first-generation mostly Cantonese-speaking residents still rely on Chinese-language news.

The station’s coverage of anti-Asian violence has given KTSF a greater “consistency of strength” in ratings over the past year, according to Schwartz. During the last week of May, KTSF’s hourlong Cantonese newscast topped ratings among women between 25 and 54 across all local newscasts, placing ahead of all five local English-speaking news channels, according to Nielsen figures provided by KTSF. To Schwartz, the adage of “bad news equals good ratings” was an unfortunate reality.

“All the things that have happened that have been negative to the Asian community, from a news rating perspective, have been beneficial to us,” Schwartz said. “Because people want to know — particularly people who speak Chinese — want to hear from a Chinese station: What’s going on?”

An Outlet For Survivors

Anne Ng, KTSF’s news director, first noticed more crime incidents targeting Asian Americans last fall and saw a larger spike at the beginning of this year — particularly break-ins and vandalism.

As the incidents piled up, Ng worried about older viewers who would hear about the rampant crime and be afraid to leave their houses or to contact the police if they were victimized. To help, KTSF ran stories on self-defense tips featuring local martial artists, interviewed Chinese-speaking police officers to urge people to call 911 and warned viewers about phone scammers looking to capitalize on vulnerable older people.

“A lot of Chinese, especially the old generation, they are so afraid of contacting the police and say, ‘Oh, I'm not going to do anything about it. Even though I got discriminated against,’” Ng said. “But right now, we have to teach them. You have to stand up, you have to speak out in order to prevent this kind of stuff from happening.”

The station also sought to strike a balance of reporting the information without sensationalizing the dangers for older residents or stoking unnecessary fear in the community.

“I don’t want to inflame a 75-year-old viewer who’s seeing this as, ‘Oh, my God, don’t go out,’” Schwartz said. “That’s not the message that we want to put out there. We want to give the story. We want to tell people to be safe and live your lives.”

The station emphasized on-camera interviews with victims in its reporting. Many such victims might not have been comfortable talking to an English-speaking reporter, and KTSF had an advantage.

“The language is a major role because we can communicate in our mother language,” said Angelina Wong, who is the station’s news assignment editor and a reporter.

Wong has received emails from victims informing them of an incident. Sometimes she will contact the Community Youth Center of San Francisco, which receives government funding to help victims of anti-Asian crime and have them pass on an interview request to a victim. The station's reporters also use traditional reporting methods: knocking on every house on a block based on information from a police news release and reaching out to relatives and friends.

Understandably, not all victims were willing to speak, especially on camera. Ng said many people in the Chinese community are willing to share information as long as their faces are not shown. In those cases, the station relies on audio-only interviews.

“We need to try to talk them into it and say, ‘Maybe we can do a phone-in,’ and we just let people know what’s going on with the incident,” Ng said. “We try to persuade the victims to stand up, to speak out by themselves rather than just have somebody reporting it.”

Wong has interviewed several victims throughout the year. She tries to be a human first, not force an interview and respect a victim’s privacy. After interviews, she offers victims resources provided by her church, the Sunset Chinese Baptist Church.

Wong recalled one victim — a caretaker who was punched on a Muni bus on Mother’s Day morning while on her way to work — having nightmares after the incident.

“First of all, we have to gain their trust,” Wong said. “Because they were traumatized by the crime. Whether it’s violent crime or hate speech, I think they are traumatized psychologically.”

In at least one case, an interview with the victim following an incident dispelled the narrative reported in the mainstream media. In late March, KTSF interviewed Xiao Zhen Xie, a 75-year-old Chinese grandmother who was punched in the face by a white man on Market Street.

Video of the aftermath of the incident showed Xie — holding an ice pack to her bruised face, defiantly pointing and shouting at her attacker on a stretcher — immediately went viral on Twitter. Mainstream news media reported that Xie fought back by smacking the man with a board, but none of them actually spoke to Xie.

When KTSF reached out to Xie’s son-in-law, a business owner in Chinatown, he said Xie, who spoke Toisanese — a dialect of Cantonese — wasn’t doing interviews. But later, Wong called Xie's son, and after confirming that someone on KTSF's staff could speak Toisanese, Xie agreed to speak on the phone.

In the interview, Xie was clearly aggravated and spoke loudly and with emotion. She confirmed the injuries to her face and that the attack was unprovoked. But she also bluntly disputed reports that she hurt the attacker. Instead, Xie said she picked up a stick on the street and hit the man in the foot a few times.

“It is important for us to tell the truth,” Wong said. “The grandma was very upset about the report that referred to her as a hero and that she injured the suspect, because it was not the case.”

To Ng, the story underscored the importance of letting survivors of attacks offer their own narrative of an incident.

“We tried our best, and finally, because we spoke the dialect, that's why she spoke to us,” Ng said. “Even though it’s a phone interview, it’s pretty good because she expressed herself. She said what was going on, and she was the person who encountered that.”

Sign Of The Times

The organization Stop AAPI Hate has recorded more than 7,000 hate incidents against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community since the pandemic began. Even as pandemic restrictions wind down, the trauma suffered can be lasting for the Asian community — whether people were attacked, called names or just felt unfairly scapegoated as the cause of the pandemic.

Schwartz’s goal is to maintain KTSF’s reputation as a “mainstream middle” for its Chinese viewers, to be credible and informative and to be an outlet for those who may feel as if they are living on the fringes of America.

“Particularly for older and vulnerable people, whose primary language that they’re speaking in the home may not be English — it always gives them a little bit of stand-offishness, which I certainly understand,” Schwartz said. “I think we have the unique ability to break through that one more layer and really let people talk about how they feel.”

Schwartz doesn’t believe that the sudden coverage of racism against Asian Americans and the subsequent attention to KTSF happened in a bubble. Rather, it’s a reflection of the current cultural and political times.

“Ten years ago, Asians being mistreated was not something that people talked about,” Schwartz said. “Not because it didn’t happen. It’s always happened but really was never discussed. And now, we’re allowing things to be talked about in a small way. Are we there yet? Not at all. Is it beginning? It is.”