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Yaroslavsky on Shifts in the L.A. Mayor’s Race

Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to CBSLA News about a new poll showing Rick Caruso and Karen Bass leading the pack in the contest to become Los Angeles’ next mayor. After an early media blitz, Caruso’s poll numbers have tripled, with 24% of respondents expressing their support, just ahead of Bass’ 23%. Yaroslavsky said the trajectory of the race will shift as other candidates step up their marketing campaigns. “Karen Bass hasn’t been on television at all. Kevin de León can’t be discounted, hasn’t been on television at all. … So, it will change, I’m sure, in the weeks ahead,” he said. The race also stands to tighten as undecided voters make their choices as the June 7 primary nears, he said. “Most people don’t know all that they want to know about the candidates. Forty percent don’t know enough to make a decision at this point or they are withholding their judgment until they hear more.” 

Latinos Underrepresented on L.A. Times Opinion Pages

A UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative analysis of the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times between January 2020 and May 2021 found that Latinos were severely underrepresented. During the period that included a presidential election in which the Latino vote was critical and a COVID-19 crisis that devastated the community, just 4% of the paper’s op-eds were written by Latino authors, while 95% made no explicit mention of Latinos, according to the report, which was also cited in the L.A. Times’ Latinx Files blog. Opinion pages play a significant role in shaping policy, and Latinos’ lack of inclusion leaves them voiceless on crucial issues affecting their communities, the report concluded. “Papers like the Los Angeles Times have a responsibility to ensure that Latinos are given a proportional and fair opportunity to shape the conversation,” said LPPI Executive Director Sonja Diaz. A response from The Times pointed to recent hires aimed at increasing diversity in the newsroom.


 

Vox Podcast Host Presents ‘Flip the Script’

Sean Rameswaram, host of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast and a UCLA alumnus, shared tales of his academic and professional journey at a Feb. 19 “Flip the Script” gathering hosted by the UCLA Luskin undergraduate program. Rameswaram discussed the power of media to effect social change and invited students to the stage to share their own experiences. Before he joined Vox, Rameswaram’s career path took him to the radio organizations CBC, NPR, PRI and WNYC, and these experiences taught him how to actualize change through media, he said. As a teenager, he felt distressed by wars launched during the George W. Bush administration and the constant bombing of brown people, he said. But he found comfort in public radio. “Here are people investigating the reasons behind this conflict. Here are people trying to have a respectful conversation with everyone involved. Here are people not trying to condition my thoughts about it, but educate me,” he said. “Public radio became a second home to me.” Now, as the host of Today, Explained, he aims to make sense of the news, especially to younger demographics. In every episode, Rameswaram and his team aim to cover an issue that impacts people’s lives, and “the subtext of every episode is vote,” he said. With this call to action, he said he hopes more people will feel inspired to enact change in their communities. — Myrka Vega

See more photos from the event on Flickr.

 

A ‘New Day’ for Asian American Women in Arts and Media Luskin Lecture brings together pioneers striving for more authentic portrayals on screen and stage

By Mary Braswell

Four women who have strived to bring more authentic portrayals of Asian Americans onto the screen and stage shared stories of risk-taking, perseverance and the importance of mentorship at the opening event of this year’s UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Lecture Series. 

The pioneers from diverse parts of the arts and media landscape came together for “Dawn of a New Day,” a conversation at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles on Oct. 17.

“Tonight we hear from Asian American women who have risen to shape the narrative rather than be dictated by the gaze of others,” said Karen Umemoto, professor of urban planning and director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, one of the event’s co-sponsors.

The audience heard from Grace Lee, director of documentaries and feature films; writer, actor and satirist Fawzia Mirza; Tess Paras, who blends acting, music, comedy and producing; and comedian and performance artist Kristina Wong.

“One of the reasons I got into storytelling and filmmaking in the first place is that I wanted to tell the story that I wanted see,” said Lee, who co-founded the Asian American Documentary Network to share resources and lift up emerging artists. “I just didn’t see a lot of films or stories out there about Asian Americans, women, people of color.”

Lee says she makes a point of hiring diverse film crews and interns to “develop that pipeline so that they can see models just like I had when I was first making films.”

“It’s living your own values,” she said. “It’s really important for us to question, ‘Who gets to tell this story? We get to tell this story.’ ”

Mirza took an unconventional path into the creative arts. She was in law school when she realized she’d rather be an actor. She finished her degree and worked as a litigator to pay off student loans but realized that “art, for me, is a way of figuring out who I am.”

“Talking about my queer, Muslim, South Asian identity through art is a way for me to survive,” she said, but cautioned, “Just by virtue of claiming your identity, sometimes you’re not trying to be political but you are politicized.”

Paras spoke of the one-dimensional acting roles — like the “white girl’s nerdy friend” — that are often available to Asian American women. After a YouTube video she created to satirize such typecasting went viral, she realized, “Oh, this is what happens when you take a big risk and tell your story.”

There is a hunger for honest portrayals of diverse communities, Paras said, a lesson she learned through a crowdfunding campaign for her film about a young Filipina American who struggles to talk to her family about a sexual assault.

“Folks came out of the woodwork because I was creating something that had not to my knowledge really been told,” Paras said. “There were a bunch of young Filipino women who were like, here’s 15 dollars, here’s 25, here’s 40, because I have never seen a story about this.”

Three of the four panelists — Lee, Paras and Wong — are alumnae of UCLA, as is moderator Ada Tseng, entertainment editor for TimesOC.

“I was convinced that the rest of the world looked like UCLA, … a world where everyone is super-political and talks all the time about politics and identity,” said Wong, whose senior project for her world arts and culture major was a fake mail-order-bride site that skewered stereotypes of Asian women.

“So much of the path I’m on felt quite normal because there were other Asian American queer and non-binary folks who were creating solo work,” Wong said. Not until she left California to go on tour did she find how misunderstood her edgy humor could be.

The event was also the closing program for the multimedia exhibit “At First Light,” organized by the Japanese American National Museum and Visual Communications, a nonprofit media arts group. The UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs co-sponsored the lecture, along with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and its Center for Ethno Communications and the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA.

“The panel tonight is a testament to how far we’ve come, though we all know there’s still so much further to go,” said Umemoto, noting that UCLA’s Asian American studies and urban planning programs are marking 50-year anniversaries this year.

Also celebrating a milestone is the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, which just turned 25, Dean Gary Segura told the crowd. The Luskin Lectures are a key part of the School’s mission to hold a “dialogue with the people of Los Angeles and California on issues of public concern,” Segura said.

View additional photos from the Luskin Lecture on Flickr.

LLS_Asian Women in Media

Villasenor on Easy Access to Powerful Technology

Public Policy Professor John Villasenor spoke to Business Insider about “deepfakes,” phony videos and digital images manipulated using artificial intelligence. Easy access to both the technology to alter videos and the platforms to distribute them widely has heightened concern about deepfakes, Villsasenor said. “Everyone’s a global broadcaster now. So I think it’s those two things together that create a fundamentally different landscape than we had when Photoshop came out,” he said. Altered videos can be used in satire and entertainment, creating complications for legal efforts to crack down on malicious users. Time constraints are also an issue, Villasenor said, citing deepfakes used in political attacks. “Election cycles are influenced over the course of sometimes days or even hours with social media, so if someone wants to take legal action that could take weeks or even months,” he said. “And in many cases, the damage may have already been done.”


 

Villasenor on ‘Deepfakes,’ Free Speech and the 2020 Race

Public Policy Professor John Villasenor narrated a short Atlantic video on the proliferation of “deepfakes,” videos and audio manipulated using sophisticated technology to convincingly present fiction as fact. Deepfakes are “engineered to further undermine our ability to decide what is true and what is not true,” he said. “We are crossing over into an era where we have to be skeptical of what we see on video.”  Villasenor, who studies the intersection of digital technology with public policy and the law, predicted that deepfakes will be used to deceive voters during the 2020 presidential campaign yet cautioned against aggressive laws to rein them in. While the technology could harm targeted individuals, the First Amendment protects free expression, including many forms of parody, he said. “As concerning as this technology is, I think it’s important not to rush a whole raft of new laws into place because we risk overcorrecting,” Villasenor said.


 

Segura Responds to Trump’s Decision to Cut Foreign Aid

Gary Segura, dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and an expert in polling and public opinion, was quoted in a Pacific Standard article dissecting President Trump’s announcement to cancel foreign aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Trump has made multiple threats in the past to cut off the three Central American countries due to his dissatisfaction with their respective governments’ failures to stop people from leaving. After his recent announcement that funds would be withheld from the three nations, experts objected, explaining that the funds help combat crime and violence, ultimately serving U.S. interests. Segura maintained that ulterior motives were behind the policy decision, which would fuel the asylum crisis. He tweeted, “Pay attention folks. This is an INTENTIONAL act to drive MORE asylum seekers to the U.S. border to help [Trump] maintain his crisis. It’s ugly, devastating in impact, and bad policy.”


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