Korean Media Follows Immigrants to New Home in U.S.
By Rick Mitchell
When Lee Won Sik arrived at New York's Kennedy International Airport from South Korea nearly four years ago, he carried 10 suitcases and his four-volume family tree. At 64, he had resigned himself to leaving behind the only culture and language he'd ever known.
To his surprise, in New York Lee found a wide selection of local newspapers and magazines printed in Korean. He could even keep up with the TV soap operas from home.
Newspapers published by and for immigrants have a long history in the U.S. The Yiddish-language Jewish Forward, which is now bilingual, has kept readers informed since 1897. More recently, New York's fast-growing Korean community has established a thriving media of its own. Eight newspapers, a half dozen magazines, two radio and four television stations provide a steady stream of news and culture from America and Korea.
The newspapers are available at Korean supermarkets in midtown Manhattan and in such Korean enclaves as Flushing, in the New York borough of Queens, but are mostly distributed by mail. The contents range from articles on the problems of immigrants to classified ads for Korean churches. There is business news from around the world, ads for such get-togethers as all-Korean golf tournaments in the New York area, as well as serialized novels and articles on American history, culture and English lessons.
Most of the papers are owned by their namesakes in Korea, which transmit the home papers by satellite. They are combined with local and national sections from the U.S. in full-sized format.
A typical television night on a Korean channel has news, soap operas and top-10 countdowns of pop hits from home. Family programming predominates, with a lot of shows featuring shots of grandmas and grandpas in traditional clothes, singing folk songs. Often the words to the song roll on-screen so you can sing along, assuming you read hangul.
"For every new immigrant the media is part of their lives. It provides a linkage to the mainstream," says Lorinda Chen, a supervisor at the Asian Outreach Program at the U.S. Census Bureau. Chen, a Chinese-American, estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 Koreans living in the five New York boroughs--more than five times the 23,000 recorded in the 1980 census.
This network of Korean news and culture helps recent arrivals overcome the language barrier and get information for survival, says Chen.
Not everyone agrees that this culture-shock cushion is a good thing. "If an immigrant's only resource for news is the Korean-language media, the world becomes very narrow," says Pyung Gap Min, a professor of sociology at Queens College.
Having so much Korean entertainment and news to choose from means that many immigrants will never learn the English language or American culture. "Every day we can watch Korean news, movies and shows through satellites," Min says.
But the Korean-language media, especially print, serve a useful purpose. "They do a good job of mobilizing the community against outside forces," says Min. "When blacks boycotted Korean merchants in Brooklyn, they were affecting not just one merchant, but the entire community."
The Korean media responded to that. The Korea Times, with a daily circulation of 20,000, has been heavily involved in efforts to deal with the conflict. "It's a hot subject," said Young Kim, its associate editor.
"Our paper pushed hard for the rally in editorials," said Kim, referring to the 18 September demonstration by thousands of Koreans in front of City Hall. "We intended to press the city to help with the conflict."
After the demonstration, Mayor David Dinkins, who had been a keeping a low profile in the affair, appeared at a boycotted store to make purchases in support of the store's owner.
Min says the Korean press frequently crossed the line into advocacy. "They can be chauvinistic," he says. "They exaggerate things and are ethnically biased for our group and against other groups, especially in dealing with the Korean-black conflict."
The Korean-American Times, a weekly with a circulation of 20,000 that was established in 1987, has time to sit back and observe issues before writing about them, said Nam Gun Paik, an editor.
"We don't see things in a biased way," Paik says. "The boycott was a mutual responsibility incident. Some papers took a one-sided approach. We didn't do that."
Paik says his editorials took up Mayor Dinkins' "mosaic society" theme. "We have a responsibility to adapt to local ways.
