In a classic example of sloppy journalism, The Vancouver Sun’s award-winning religion writer did a real ‘hatchet job’ on Filipinos in its October 17, 2011 feature. Writer Douglas Todd attempted to capitalize on the recently released Statistics Canada 2006 Census on ethnic origins. It showed the most con­centration of Filipinos are in the Fraser Street area of Vancouver, prompting Todd to label it as an ‘en­clave’ which it is not. Just because there is a concentration of Filipino-owned stores in the Fraser corridor doesn’t mean it is an enclave. What riles me is the characterization that The Sun tries to portray. Con­sider this: “There are few ethnic Filipinos residing in West Vancouver, the west side of Vancouver, south Delta or south Surrey.  Most of Metro Vancouver’s Filipinos value being near transit hubs — since many need to travel inexpensively to low-to-middle-wage jobs as nannies, cleaners, se­niors care aids, security of­ficials, service clerks, short-order cooks and practical nurses.” Notice how Todd took pains to enumerate the “jobs” that Filipinos do. Are there nurses, archi­tects or other professionals out there who travel by pub­lic transit? Perhaps, Todd believes if there are, Todd implies that they all live in the rich areas so they don’t have to travel using public means?

And then he zeroed in the allegedly recent study by so­ciologist Robert Putnam’s showing that ethnic en­claves tend to create distrust among neighbours. Of course, he found a Vietnamese newspaper editor who doesn’t have any­thing to do us with us Filipi­nos. And then, bring out the Jomar Lanot murder case and presto! There is indeed ‘distrust’ among the inhabit­ants of this ‘enclave’. Aside from factual errors, Todd’s article is so patroniz­ing calling the location ‘en­claves’. As an example, he did not do the requisite verification to make sure some of his Filipino words were correct. He called the ‘barong’ as ‘sarong’.

Filipino men do not wear a ‘sarong’ like Mayor Robert­son or MLA Don Davies. They wear the ‘barong’, which is consid­ered the national costume. NDP MLA Mable Elmore (Vancouver-Kensington), the first Filipina to win office, only merited a postscript in the article.

Is the fact that Robertson and Davies ‘patronized’ a Filipino store more important in a feature about us? And why did The Sun sent its religion editor to do this story?
True, Todd ‘found out’ that religion and family are important values to Filipinos (if you notice the deliberate use of it in the headline) but are these not motherhood values? It’s not peculiar to Filipinos alone and I am sure Todd’s ethnic heritage also values these traits.

Even if he wanted to ‘slant’ the story on religion, he did not do a good job at it con­sidering that he has written on how Filipinos practice their religion on previous ar­ticles he had written on us. Confronting fellow jour­nalists is not a new experi­ence for this writer. I believe that as community journal­ists, we have to tackle this kind of issue head-on. Oth­erwise, mainstream news­papers can ride rough-sod over us.

Back in my Winnipeg newspapering days in the early 80’s, I took on the Winnipeg Sun for its rac­ist coverage on Filipinos. The word ‘racial profiling’ was not in vogue during that time but The Winni­peg Sun identified Filipi­nos in every crime story regardless of whether it was ‘germane’ to the story or not. The Winnipeg Sun ca­pitulated and eventually changed its editorial policy after we called a boycott of the paper. Perhaps that should be called for in the case of The Vancouver Sun whose ‘racist’ tendencies are very well-known in the Lower Mainland’s ethnic com­munity. - Ted Alcuitas Comments: tedalcui­tas @shaw.ca

< Prev		Next >