As mainstream media fragments, ethnic media’s value rises

Taking my storytelling to theaters before live audiences has been part of my evolution into “poetic journalism.”  For the last few years, I’ve used my columns as springboards for my comic memoirs that I bring to the stage.

The newest iteration of my live Amok monologues features a new story about my conversion therapy as a transdad.

Conversion Therapy? Transdad?

You can see the show in New York City starting April 5. If you’re in the area come by and see me live.

But I am still honored that you can catch me each week here in the Inquirer.net.  Even when I was on mainstream media locally or nationally, I always saw my work in the ethnic media as the most important.

For example, mainstream media will gladly report poll findings on voters of color as they did after last week’s Michigan primary. The emerging narrative in the 2024 campaign has been how President Joe Biden and the Democrats are leaking POC support, making the possibility of a Trump win greater than it should be.

In 2020, Biden was up 62 percent among voters of color. Last week the number shrunk. Biden is up just 21 percent among voters of color.

Another poll showed similar drops in Arizona and Nevada and other key states.

The white media will report the headlines. The ethnic media is where we turn to understand why POC feel the way they do, and how we could be the vote that determines the future of our democracy.

I first began writing my “Emil Amok” columns on Filipinos in publications in 1991. I’ve been writing race-focused columns like this for over 30 years.

I mention this simply to indicate how much journalism has changed in that time. The “ethnic media” was always separate from the mainstream, serving audiences that felt neglected by the white media. If you didn’t see your Black, Brown or Asian story, idea or thought reflected in places like The New York Times, you could always get it in the ethnic media.

But now as our country has grown more diverse, all media has taken the condition of the ethnic media.

White Ethnic Media

The perfect mirror that I had hoped to see in mainstream media is becoming a pipe dream. Instead of trying to serve all, journalism has become fragmented, communicating to specific audiences that exist in “news bubbles.” At least that’s the latest take by Axios, which since its inception has dealt with the changes in journalism in its own way. It established a slightly more intellectual USA Today meets “Cliff Notes” style it brands as “smart brevity.”

But now, in our current divided America, diversity has proven to be too polarizing to create a mass audience that sustains mainstream media. Profits are smaller than greed demands.

Big Media is discovering that fragmenting into news silos is the only capitalistic thing to do. You make more money  going for the niches among whites.

It’s an unfortunate turn because profit is now the arbiter of truth.

If there is no one set of facts that we as Americans can agree on, the news media now gladly serves up whatever an audience wants, not what it needs to know. This is the mentality that gives us Fox, NewsMax, and One America. One is right, the other righter, the other righter still.

This is the new news environment for an algorithmic America.

It only seems worse in an election year because we now have narratives galore to choose from, all claiming to be truthier than the other.

Bubblization? Nichefication? News audience are going from broad to narrow

Right now, the truth can be customized just for your group because each demographic, organization, class, age and religious sect can have its own news source that it prefers and relies on.

We are closer and closer to the day when yes, not only are you entitled to your own opinion, but you are also entitled to your own facts.

This is a detriment to journalism and our democracy. What’s true? We’ll just have to debate ‘til the death, I suppose. Maybe literally.

As society has become more diverse, mainstream news media seems ripe for an “ethnic media” approach of its own.

“America is splintering into more than a dozen news bubbles based on ideology, wealth, jobs, age and location,” writes Axios today.

Notice Axios didn’t say “race.”

Because this is the breaking up of the white media into the new “white ethnic media.”

It’s the way Asian Americans have always seen the mainstream since we arrived in America and were forced to publish our own media, many times in our native tongues.

And now just as America has evolved, all of media and journalism seems to have changed differently than expected.

Too bad. The mainstream was once seen as our common ground. What Axios is saying is in an America where there is very little common ground, this is what news has become. What we thought we had in common through media is now “shattered into a bunch of misshapen pieces.”

I’m still holding out hope for mainstream media orgs that still value being the comprehensive source of truth, democracy’s perfect mirror.

It all points to the need to support your local ethnic media, in print or online. Where else are we going to turn to for the truth? It’s publications like this one, the Inquirer.net where we fill in the blanks.

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. He does a mini-talk show on YouTube.com/@emilamok1.  He wishes all his readers a Happy Easter!