China news in Chinese big draw in California

By Michelle R. Smith
Associated Press

BRISBANE, Calif. — To many in the San Francisco Bay Area who speak Chinese, network coverage of President Bush's trip to China had nowhere near the breadth of their local station's report.

While mainstream media covered such angles as human rights and the war on terror, KTSF offered Chinese-language newscasts for an audience also interested in news about Taiwan's pullout from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and the five days' vacation given to Shanghai residents during the conference.

U.S. Census data show Asians were the fastest-growing group in the United States during the 1990s, especially in California. They include many Chinese Americans, who represent a "subterranean market" that hungers for news about China, said China expert Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the

University of California-Berkeley.

KTSF, an independent station based in suburban Brisbane, has been producing news since 1989, when Mei Ling Sze, a television journalist from Hong Kong, helped start "Cantonese News." She later began "Mandarin News," which airs nightly for 30 minutes.

With an editorial staff of 14, KTSF takes video from CNN, Hong Kong's ATV News, Taiwan's Power TV and Beijing-based CCTV, and writes its own stories for its Chinese-speaking audience. For local news it has five reporters on staff.

The station's audience isn't measured by Nielsen Media Research, but a study commissioned by KTSF found that 86 percent of Cantonese-speaking households in the Bay Area were tuning in on any given night, according to Michael Sherman, KTSF's general manager.

"Most of these households are monolingual," Sherman said. "We almost have a captive audience."

Though bound together by language, the ethnic Chinese population in the United States includes widely diverging viewpoints, and Sze tries to reflect the different perspectives of China, Taiwan and the United States in the station's reports.