Journalism for everyone
July 11th, 2024
Christopher Cheung (at right) spent his childhood in a multicultural neighbourhood in Vancouver that he believed wasn’t reflected in the local news. Cheung later became a journalist and, after ten years working in the field, he has written Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism (UBC Press/Purich Books $24.95).
BCBookLook: What do you mean by the “White Gaze”?
Christopher Cheung: A white gaze is a white point of view that shapes depictions of a subject. Whiteness may be presented as normal while everything else is presented as the other: as abnormal, as exotic, as lesser.
Toni Morrison had a great way of describing the white gaze. She called it a little figure that sits on your shoulder and checks out everything you do or say.
I think the white gaze is a great way to understand journalism in Canada and question how it’s constructed. Journalism might be a collection of facts and not fiction, but it’s important to ask how those facts are presented and from whose point of view.
What stories are told about people of colour? How are those people presented? Who is the intended audience, and how is the story being shaped for them? Who decides which stories are worth telling? What stories aren’t being told?
BCBL: Please give some concrete examples of how the White Gaze impacts news gathering and news stories.
CC: The two big impacts I see are when racialized people are missing or misrepresented in the news.
Missing means when journalists leave out big pockets of the population, ignore the issues that concern them, and neglect to cover the places they live. This can happen when newsrooms don’t hire people from those communities and white journalists fail to look outside of their networks for stories.
Misrepresented is when journalists do feature racialized people in their coverage, but the stories are inaccurate or tokenizing. This might be simplistic stories about immigrants who say that hard work is all it takes to succeed in Canada or coverage that introduces white people to a holiday they’re unfamiliar as if they’re tourists, rather thing showing how people from that culture celebrate the holiday at home.
Rather than stories that look at a racialized group from the outside in, we need more stories that cover groups from the inside out.
BCBL: When you chose journalism as a career, what were you initially hoping to achieve?
CC: I grew up in a neighbourhood called Oakridge, right in the middle of Vancouver, which was kind of a poster example of Canadian diversity. Vancouver has its reputation of being a multicultural city, but my neighbourhood was even more multicultural than the city on average. My classmates had roots from all over the world and one of the ways I got to experience that diversity was from the recess snacks! One friend would share Japanese dried seaweed and another would bring Iranian fruit leather from his dad’s grocery. As I got older, I noticed the class and family diversity too. Some had big families who owned more than one house in the neighbourhood, while others rented old apartments with one parent.
I was never interested in the news because I didn’t find that the coverage reflected these worlds that I knew growing up. Even when I decided to become a journalist later, I wasn’t trying to achieve anything big. I just personally wanted to see stories that told me about people I shared the city with: what’s important to them, what their lives are like, what struggles they face and why. Talking to other journalists of colour like me, it seems like many of us entered the industry for the same reason.
BCBL: What are some of the difficulties you encountered while producing news stories about non-white communities? What traps did you fall into, at least in the beginning?
CC: Because racial representation was so lacking, I’d be happy whenever I wrote stories that featured non-white characters without much thought into how they were being presented. I wrote lots of happy stories about “model minorities” who were able to assimilate. I introduced non-European cultures to audiences in an exotic way, everything from food to religions. Aside from story tropes, this applied to language too. I would refer to European cultures as “Canadian,” but not others, and I think this subliminally tells audiences there are only certain ways to be Canadian. My stories were popular reads, but they were not very complex. They didn’t cover the wide diversity of experiences of people of colour.
It would’ve been great if I had a non-white editor aware of racial issues to help me craft my stories. But working in journalism for over a decade now, I’ve only ever had one editor of colour editing my stories about people of colour. I think it helps to have someone who knows what it’s like to be “othered” to check whether my stories are othering a group.
BCBL: Please provide some examples of being treated as a token diversity journalist, either as the only non-white person in a group or “the missing yellow crayon among a carefully chosen rainbow” as you described it.
CC: There have been times when I’ve been offered work to cover certain “Asian” topics or to use my Cantonese language ability and appearance as a Chinese person. Yes, it’s true that I often write about East Asian people, and yes, I have used Cantonese in my reporting. But it’s awkward when those seeking me out try to force a story angle about “Asians” that I don’t agree with, insist that I should cover this “Asian” thing even though I tell them it’s something I have no experience or interest in, or want me to help them get that “Asian” access because of who I am. It’s even more awkward when during our conversation they make it apparent that they’ve never read any of my reporting and are unfamiliar with my specialities as a reporter — they only wanted me as a means to an end.
It gets complicated if that ask is coming from an outlet with a big audience. Even if the story is tokenizing, do I accept the assignment if I feel like the coverage can do some good in the world?
BCBL: What meaningful improvements, if any, have newsrooms made towards serving diversity in your experience?
CC: It’s not enough to simply hire journalists of colour and hope representation in the coverage will follow after that. There are some great fellowships and mentorship programs out there directly catered to journalists of colour, and this is important because surveys tell us that they are underrepresented in the industry. Once they are hired, let them cook! I’ve heard of too many white managers telling their racialized journalists what they think the important stories of race are. Having a diverse management is also important, to introduce a variety of lived experiences among the leadership who determine the news of the day.
Beyond hires, the best reporters consider the diversity of their respective beats, from dimensions like race, class, to gender, and so on. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter whether a reporter is covering labour or politics or the environment. Those who pay attention to these dimensions come out with the richest stories.
I remember when the CBC announced that announced that it was opening pop-up bureaus in the cities of Richmond and Surrey, known for their large East Asian and South Asian populations, respectively. In the release, they talked about the opportunity for the bureaus to “dig deep” in “diverse” and “underserved” communities. It was exactly what I thought was needed, considering how much attention is focused on Vancouver and not so much the growing suburbs where immigrants were settling — but the bureaus wrapped up in a matter of months. If newsrooms want to serve underserved communities, it’s got to be more than a pilot project.
BCBL: What are some of the biggest problems still hampering diversity in Canadian journalism?
CC: I think the biggest problem when it comes to diversity in Canadian journalism is the idea that there isn’t a problem.
The Canadian Association of Journalists has been conducting an annual demographic survey of newsrooms for a few years now and most of our biggest outlets have taken part. However, there are over 500 that have not responded. It makes me wonder if they scoff at the point of such a survey. But looking at the makeup of our industry is important because there is still inequality within it. The survey reveals that it is mostly white men who make up management, and racialized journalists are overrepresented in part-time and internship roles. Beyond that, how does this power dynamic affect which stories are greenlighted?
I think some newsrooms believe they’ve already “arrived” when it comes to diversity because they have some reporters of colour and put out a racialized face on cover stories every now and then. But are there journalists of colour in management positions? Are the stories helping bring in new audiences who are happy to see coverage of their communities? How are diversity goals being measured? Newsrooms should constantly be asking themselves how they’re doing on representation and whether they are serving their audiences — both their current and potential audiences.
I hope the public will better understand the importance of coverage that reflects racial and ethnocultural diversity. I’ve encountered readers who say things like “I’m not part of that community so that story doesn’t concern me.” But that’s naïve because we’re all part of a society that has racial and ethnocultural divisions and dimensions. Choosing to ignore a story that features someone who is different from you is choosing to be ignorant about the full picture of what’s happening in your community.
BCBL: Anything else you would particularly like to add that we haven’t touched on?
CC: I know this book has a title that might be considered provocative, but it’s really calling for something that really shouldn’t be provocative: that journalism in Canada should be for everyone in Canada. It just so happens with our history of European colonization, that point of view that has persisted is a white one. I hope that the book will get journalists and audiences asking those tough questions about how the news is produced.
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Christopher Cheung is a staff reporter at The Tyee. He has been awarded many honours including two Jack Websters, BC’s top journalism awards, and he holds a Master of Journalism from UBC.
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An edited version of this interview will be published in the Fall 2024 issue of BC BookWorld quarterly newspaper.
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