In an election year when Chinese voters are being courted by all the major contenders, incumbent Mayor London Breed relishes a distinct advantage: Every other Sunday, her column gets a full-page spread in the print edition of Sing Tao Daily, San Francisco’s largest Chinese newspaper. Her columns also appear in World Journal, the second-largest Chinese newspaper.
Newspapers giving an incumbent mayor in a knock-down-drag-out re-election battle such a media position, editors and academics said, raises ethical issues of equal access. It’s particularly relevant in a race when all the major candidates are vying for the Chinese vote, which represents about 15 percent of the electorate.
The “Mayor’s Column,” written under her signature, usually contains a bilingual letter about San Francisco, photos of Breed at Chinese community-related events (which often include her allies, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and City Administrator Carmen Chu), a profile photo of Breed, and two QR codes for her official WeChat account.
The column began soon after Breed’s 2018 inauguration as mayor, and has generally touched on aspect relevant to the Chinese community. An August 2022 column, for example, talked about the Bayfront Park project in Mission Bay, where a considerable Chinese population resides.
As the election has heated up, however, the columns increasingly overlap with Breed’s campaign platform. More than half of this year’s columns have been laser focused on public safety, the No. 1 issue for all of the candidates and Chinese voters.
Other columns have dealt with homelessness, downtown recovery, and cracking down on fentanyl, all issues Breed pledges to accomplish if granted a next term. The only three exceptions were a column that wished readers a happy Lunar New Year, one about Breed’s trip to China and one that educated seniors about scams.
“No matter how well-written it is or how accurate it is, it’s still propaganda, by the nature of it,” said Ken Doctor, a media ethicist and the chief executive officer and founder of Lookout Santa Cruz, which just won the 2024 Breaking News Pulitzer Prize.
Jeremy Rue, associate professor of practice in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, said candidates “will certainly promote themselves and their achievements” in such platforms, and that they offered an advantage in any election year.
What is Rue’s suggestion for the news outlets? “Try to balance this out in fairness to other candidates.”
That was echoed by Theodore L. Glasser, professor emeritus of communication at Stanford University, whose research focuses on media practices and performance. “Generally, public debate is a key aspect of American journalism,” he said. “That means providing space for dialogue, not monologue.”
But this doesn’t mean Breed should change her behavior, he said. “She should continue to write her column. Why should she be compelled to drop the column?” Glasser said.
“I have no objection to the newspaper providing a space for the mayor to speak to his or her constituents,” Glasser added. “But I think the publication has an obligation to seek out responses to her column, especially during a campaign season.” Often it’s “impossible” to distinguish whether Breed writes from her role as a mayor, or her role as a candidate, Glasser added.
Joyce Chen, Sing Tao Daily’s western edition’s deputy chief editor, said she and her colleagues had thought about the issue. “Yes, because we know the campaign is going on, of course we want to be balanced,” she said. “We are thinking about maybe moving or switching the piece to a more unusual page, maybe just like our opinion page.”
There is no plan, however, to offer the same platform to other mayoral candidates, she said, because the intention is to offer “the platform for them as a public official to talk about their work, not about campaign.”
Indeed, Breed wasn’t the first mayor to enjoy the Sunday space. Sing Tao’s Mayor’s Column started with Ed Lee, who made history as the city’s first Chinese mayor, and continued through Farrell’s months, according to Chen. (World Journal started its column in 2018 with Breed.)
Neither Breed nor Sing Tao Daily pays the other for printing the columns, which read like measured press releases. The goal of Breed’s column is “to enhance communication with the Chinese community,” according to an Aug. 5, 2018, editor’s note on Sing Tao Daily.
In comparison, after leaving office, former Mayor Willie Brown got paid by the San Francisco Chronicle for being its Sunday columnist for 12 years. Brown’s column was curtailed in early 2021 after long-standing internal and external criticism.
Occasionally, Sing Tao also publishes Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, but those columns are for the District 3 supervisor to talk about his legislative work, not about his mayoral run, Chen said. Plus, being the supervisor of Chinatown for almost two decades, Peskin is a familiar figure Chinese readers care about.
“Some of the other public officials, if they have the Chinese ability to translate some articles, we are always very happy to publish them,” Chen added. But the columns are restricted to officials, not candidates.
Apart from providing newsworthy stories, Sing Tao Daily, like other ethnic media outlets, functions as a way for immigrants to gain a sense of belonging in the country, and helps close the gap between government and its non-English-speaking constituents. “It’s really more about educating [the community], outreach about city government, services they have, how the community can look for help if they need anything,” said Chen.
Sing Tao Daily, she said, didn’t have too much internal discussion before allowing Breed to add her WeChat QR code to the page. The latter takes up a whole page on the web version. “Because we know it’s, like, the official email or contact info. So we include it. It’s okay,” said Chen. This can be interpreted differently, however: Aspiring candidates this year use WeChat to attract Chinese voters.
Take Breed’s July 14 column titled “Prop. E — a safer San Francisco,” where she described the policy changes brought by her March ballot measure, which reduced police oversight and loosened rules around vehicle pursuits. While Prop. E has not yet been enacted, Breed still tied it to other “improvements on public safety” San Francisco has seen.
“In the first six months of 2024, San Francisco has seen its lowest crime rate in 10 years,” she continued. “Compared to the same six-month period in 2018 before I took office, violent crime is down 26% and property crime is down 40%.”
Left unsaid was a subtle dig at her campaign opponent: Mark Farrell was mayor during that six-month stretch.
Similarly, in a March 10 column titled “San Francisco is moving forward” based on Breed’s State of the City address, she tossed shade at her competitors and critics. “We must celebrate those who have worked to support San Francisco through its recent challenges … despite others’ interest to create distracting and divisive rhetoric,” she wrote.
Farrell’s campaign said it would “definitely consider” a column if offered the same platform. For now, Farrell is focused on “earned” media coverage.
“The Chinese community sees the difference between when someone’s writing in their own words and when it’s a reporter that’s writing the news,” read a statement from the Farrell campaign. Moreover, heading into the fall, the campaign is also planning to do Chinese paid media, including a variety of different means from print ads to commercials to digital ads.
Some other mayoral campaigns declined to comment on the record for fear of affecting their relationship with Chinese media, one of the very few ways to access monolingual Chinese-speaking voters.
Media ethicist Doctor is not convinced. “It’s just completely unethical, for any group of voters,” he said. “They need to be given an open playing field and equal access to information. Especially if they’re lower-information voters, they really need a lot of information about candidates.”
This article should probably also note that Sing Tao was compelled by the Department of Justice in 2021 to register as a foreign agent under FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, because of its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (https://www.axios.com/2021/08/25/doj-chinese-owned-sing-tao-newspaper-foreign-agent). US politicians should think twice before associating themselves to closely with a pro-CCP publication like Sing Tao, and US media should dedicate more attention to the various pro-CCP groups operating in the US.