A blood stained article that no one should have to pay for. Photo courtesy of health and sports co-editor Aidan Field.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article on January 23, at 5:53 pm with a headline reading “Are there ‘Too Many Asians.’”
For real.
Over the course of the next few hours the article was viewed and screenshotted a countless amount of times, and it was no doubt seen by students of San Luis Obispo High School. As someone who is half Asian I was shocked that someone would write a headline like this, but as an editor of a school newspaper I was shocked that this headline was allowed to see the light of day, especially on a professional publication that’s read by millions where journalistic integrity is supposedly upheld. Because of that, I found this headline not only offensive but also carelessly harmful.
The headline should have never been published.
“It’s beyond insensitive and the person behind the title should be ashamed,” said SLOHS Expressions’ News editor, Erika Spargo.
The timing of this article, matched with its abhorrent headline made this even more atrocious. A headline that could be interpreted as a call to action of mass Asian racial genocide was published onto one of the most read news sites in the country just a day after two mass shootings occurred in California that targeted Asians. This left 18 Asian-Americans dead.
San Luis Obispo is less than a four hour drive from both of these locations and many students have friends or family who were directly affected by one of these events, including myself.
But let’s not let silly things like our feelings get in the way of a headline, let’s look at some statistics.
The world is nearly sixty percent Asian, not including the amount of Asains who don’t live in Asia. That’s a lot of Asians, but, in the United States only six percent of residents are Asian. This doesn’t include those with middle-eastern origin.
But a quick look at the WSJ’s leadership, Asians make up a staggering zero percent of editors and managers.
However, let’s give the WSJ the benefit of the doubt. The article that the headline was attached to wasn’t directly racist and WSJ changed the headline after the intense outrage it caused. The article was about the population bomb that took place in Asia and especially China in the latter half of the twentieth century. The article truly didn’t intend to be racist and the headline was supposed to be a play on an old book titled, “Too Many Asians.”
But, in the article the author, William McGurn, acknowledged that the title would, “not fly today.” Which poses the question, if they knew that the phrase was potentially inflammatory, why would they publish it? They acknowledged that it was offensive, and even potentially harmful, and they published the article anyway. To make it worse other publications wrote similar articles on the same topic without using such an offensive headline.
“The author of the article had clear intentions– to stir up people’s emotions and get people talking about the article, regardless of whether it’s negative or positive commentary,” said Spargo.
This article should have been stopped at every step of the publication process, but it wasn’t. This shows recklessness, and unprofessionalism in WSJ’s newsroom. I encourage SLOHS students to not read bad news.
Sources: worldometers.info, census.gov, wsj.com, wsj.com
