Lawrence.com

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 pull-out 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. 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 at 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.

Of the more than 2.4 million Chinese in the United States, more than 980,000 live in California � mostly concentrated in the San Francisco Bay area, according to the U.S. Census.

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."

Those numbers are borne out in the popularity of Chinese-language newspapers. The Mandarin-language World Journal, owned by a Taiwanese company, claims to be the biggest Chinese-language paper in the United States, with a North American circulation of about 350,000. The Hong Kong-based Cantonese newspaper Sing Tao Daily, however, disputes that, claiming it's the largest.

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 mainland China, Taiwan and the United States in the station's reports.

KTSF's nightly Mandarin-language call-in show "China Crosstalk," with Jay Stone Shih as host, must also find that balance.

"We talk about facts. We try to stay away from rhetoric," he said.

Schell says Shih's program is succeeding.

"It's as balanced as it gets," Schell says. "The Chinese language media was once very anti-communist. Now it tends to tread very gingerly on those issues."

	� www.ktsf.com

Mainstream American media is not spared the critical eye Chinese have used to view Chinese government-sponsored news for years.

Shih, Sze and Sherman all point to Chinese-Americans' reaction to the conflict last spring over the U.S. spy plane that went down on Hainan Island.

"Their first instinct was not to trust American media," Sherman said. "They wanted to hear Chinese sources on the same thing."