This article concludes the NPQ series titled The New Asian Diaspora Media: Defending Democracy Locally and Globally. Co-produced with Kavitha Rajagopalan, who directs a program on community journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY), this series highlights stories of how different Asian American communities are using grassroots digital media to meet their communities’ need for trustworthy in-language information amid a media environment distorted by rampant disinformation.
TNP (Trần Nhật Phong) is a Vietnamese American YouTube influencer based in Texas, who offers his own individual interpretations of English-language sources and domestic and international news for the Vietnamese diaspora. With an estimated 475,000 subscribers, he uploads multiple videos daily.
Diasporic media…connects people living in communities far away from their homelands with each other in service of enhancing political engagement and participation.
In his coverage, TNP offers partial accounts. For example, in coverage of Gaza solidarity protests he frames activists’ calls for peace as indistinguishable from the violence done by countries at war, labeling the demonstrators “communists,” which is both factually inaccurate and a distracting form of red-baiting.
In response to this kind of inadequate media coverage—lacking in both accuracy and nuance—grassroots immigrant organizations continue developing a diasporic community media journalism (DCMJ) to build a more informed and engaged public.
We define DCMJ as simultaneously local and transnational projects that connect people living in communities far away from their homelands with each other in service of enhancing political engagement and participation. This can take a variety of forms—from engaging in formal politics (such as elections and policy advocacy) to participating in social movements and everyday conversations.
“Sharing Stories, Sharing Trust”: Addressing Misinformation in Workshops
Viet Fact Check (VFC) is an example of a grassroots group that became a nonprofit and employs the DCMJ approach. It serves as a bilingual digital resource that can contextualize and explain current events across generations.
VFC offers translations, interpretations, and verified analyses of current events, providing historical and sociopolitical context to issues like abortion and reproductive access, systemic anti-Black racism, and the occupation of Palestine. Its audience includes Vietnamese refugees and immigrants living in the West, who are fluent in Vietnamese and/or English, and who are concerned with false, harmful, and contentious information spreading in their communities.
What sets [diasporic community media] apart from other in-language diasporic media is the willingness to contend directly with racism and imperialism.
VFC’s platform challenges the cultural expectation that many in the Vietnamese diaspora “do not talk about politics.” It also provides a critical tool for addressing misinformation through the lens of narrative change, where “correction” is not neutral, but informed by a nuanced analysis of power relations.
An example of VFC’s community-engaged work is Sharing Stories, Sharing Trust—a workshop series that brings multiple generations together to build intra-community trust and to provide critical media literacy skills.
In the process, participants share personal and cultural narratives and form a wider community that guides the organization’s media practice. VFC exemplifies the ideal of DCMJ by empowering community members to navigate the legacies of imperialism and colonialism while engaging in participatory, democratic storytelling.
Using Media to Forge a Stronger Transnational Community
What sets DCMJ apart from other in-language diasporic media is the willingness to contend directly with racism and imperialism, including the histories of violence that have shaped and sustained US and Western democracies, while also employing a broad media justice and movement building approach. Also, where pan–Asian American organizations and outlets may often miss diasporic contexts, these projects respond to often-overlooked details by providing nuanced and relevant community-centric storytelling.
Digital Asian DCMJ projects in the United States include platforms mentioned in this collection, such as Khasokhas, Indonesian Lantern, Justice Patch, and Tayo. These publications as community platforms reshape understandings of democratic politics and political engagement, where diverse experiences and histories of movement, migration, and displacement are reflected through intra-community dynamics—that is, immigration status, generation, region, language, and faith.
These projects dissect social issues and current events in accessible ways, fostering relationships and kinship networks between the publication and local, regional, national, and/or transnational community readership to determine information needs; and creating physical and digital spaces for engagement beyond the publication itself.
They can span local, regional, national, and transnational circulation, and as such, balance tensions between geographic scales. Resonating to audiences that hold multiple marginalized identities across borders, DCMJ navigates ongoing identity formation processes mutually shaped by historical and contemporary racism and colonialism of transnational communities.
New digital diasporic platforms are a departure from mainstream media as they actively work to use media and information channels to subvert existing power dynamics and structures. DCMJ is mutually shaped by existing perspectives and analyses of editors, writers, and readers—and seeks to grow transnational solidarity. In this way, these projects cultivate information environments that acknowledge intersectional identities of refugees and immigrants.
As Kavitha Rajagopalan points out, past and present DCMJ projects take myriad forms, including on-the-ground reports from displaced and refugee communities (such as Indonesian Lantern) to local news that serves these communities (such as 285 South in Atlanta, GA); oral histories from marginalized voices in diaspora (such as People’s Archive of Rural India, Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, South Asian American Digital Archive, Koreatown Storytelling Program); and in-language service journalism projects with home offices in countries of origin (such as Khasokhas and Weekly Bangalee).
By taking on racism and imperialism, DCMJ projects often must navigate different forms of risk, safety, and precarity.
Some DCMJ publications began in their own countries but have been forcibly displaced to the United States because of political pressures at home. Such is the case, for example, with Etilaatroz from Afghanistan and Người Việt from Vietnam.
These publications take a variety of forms—digital, print, broadcast television, and radio, as well as large group chats on messaging applications, such as WeChat and WhatsApp. DCMJ functions as a combination of journalistic practice, civic advocacy, community service, organizing, and activism.
Reckoning with Race, Imperialism, and Media Risk
As noted above, a focus on race and imperialism is central to the DCMJ project. This is different from traditional ethnic media, which often may hold “homeland/hostland” biases, whether as a means of assimilation, acculturation, or survival—which can at times reify forms of racism and ethnonationalism. Indeed, some popular in-language outlets are financially backed by political parties and factions with anti-democratic agendas.
It should be noted, however, that by taking on racism and imperialism, DCMJ projects often must navigate different forms of risk, safety, and precarity. These risks include state-sanctioned repression and extrajudicial killings, intra-community tension and division, and a lack of community receptiveness to charged topics.
As DCMJ often operate precariously—from journalists navigating immigration, exclusion, and conflict to outlets facing surveillance, repression, and other modes of state violence—these publications must negotiate shifting dynamics between democratic governance and authoritarianism in countries as varied as the United States, India, Philippines, and Bangladesh—and analyze how local, regional, and transnational dynamics of power and political contexts unfold across multiple geographies.
For example, Vietnamese diasporic community media is historically rooted in “push and pull factors in relation to coping with forced displacement and expressions of postwar growth,” demonstrating how DCMJ must navigate tensions between dissent, resistance, and assimilation.
Just as DCMJ challenges journalistic notions of neutrality, diasporic communities’ histories and experiences challenge Western claims to be democratic states. US liberal democracy has long relied on imperial violence, where freedom is secured and administered via a contradictory relationship with national security—what gender scholar Chandan Reddy describes as “freedom with violence.”
The US federal state is a source and originator of racial violence. US imperialism, militarism, and war-making facilitates diaspora through occupation, dispossession, and displacement—which in turn shapes and contextualizes the diasporic media landscape.
Additionally, US state violence (and Western imperialism), in tandem with historical and contemporary forms of intra-Asian violence, imperialism, and colonialism (ranging from Japan’s colonial rule in East and Southeast Asia to the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka) impacts displacement and migration and enables internal hierarchies of difference in local communities.
These power dynamics get carried over to other places post-migration. For example, the partition of India after British colonization and Indian state positioning of Sikhs as separatists have ongoing effects today. Legacies of war, militarism, and empire undergird many diasporic communities’ relationships to the United States. DCMJ works within these complex historical contexts to cultivate trust in participatory politics and democratic processes.
Rebuilding Diasporic Community Trust
Community media foster deep relationships of trust with their readers. Traditionally, journalism as a profession and practice normalizes objectivity, such as sharing “all sides” of a story, presenting information in “neutral” ways (which reify Whiteness and dominant power structures), or presuming distance between the “objective” journalist and the reader.
The result has been that mainstream journalism—to say nothing of misinformation outlets—often fails to adequately contextualize communities’ experiences or address their needs. Historically, journalism has contributed to shaping and been shaped by colonial powers; and reinforced the status quo among colonial and racial hierarchies, such as through stereotypical and racist portrayals of Indigenous people and people of color that justify imperial expansion.
Focus on mitigating “bias” or maintaining an “objective” perspective from Western hegemonic perspectives ignores the nuance necessary to engage with communities coming from different experiences, especially diasporic perspectives, or to build substantive relationships with communities that already lack compassionate, nonstereotypical, and inclusive reporting.
In considering these community relationships, DCMJ provides potential interventions and complicates understandings of the crisis in journalistic authority. Public trust in the news has significantly declined, fueled by both right-wing populism and longstanding critiques by marginalized communities. While DCMJ cannot solve all these problems, the models of DCMJ explored in this series offer a path toward a more transformative—rather than reformist—vision of what journalism could be.
In this approach, DCMJ journalists do not merely disseminate information in one direction; rather, they work alongside communities to understand what’s important to them, how they understand certain issues, and then bilaterally develop accessible and relevant stories that inform. DCMJ addresses media redlining, information voids, and rebuilds trust through different forms of co-creating.
In other words, diasporic media offer community-centered resources that extend past fact-checking and providing information—and toward participatory democracy.
Envisioning Transnational Solidarity
This model is not new—newspapers from communities of color have long taken up the call for activist and solidarity journalism, such as the abolitionist newspaper, The North Star.
Asian diasporic community journalism today similarly engages with the geopolitics of media and information landscapes, the tensions and contradictions between democratic and authoritarian politics, and communities’ different entanglements with power.
As a result, in these communities DCMJ helps to shape people’s longer-term relationships to political struggle. DCMJ builds on advocacy journalism, movement journalism, and solidarity journalism to focus on “addressing the roots of systemic issues” and holding “an unjust system accountable” in order to work for “social, political, and economic transformation”.
Additionally, given the explorations of the antidemocratic financial backing of popular in-language media, independent in-language media is more important than ever. DCMJ offers a lens to understand forms of independent media as alternatives to mainstream news—which is often precarious due to issues of funding, sustainability, and consolidation—that can balance sustainability with maintaining (and evolving) sharp and nuanced political analyses.
The work ahead requires using community-based media and information practices to strengthen communities’ political analysis and prepare them to participate and engage in movement organizing.
As Asian Pacific diaspora communities contend with a range of issues, including the ongoing threat of resettlement, historic traumas, and experiences with authoritarianism, DCMJ works to build new transnational solidarities.
