I’m Not The Only One

No, that wasn’t a typo.  Xenophobes like California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have long insisted that Latinos, especially those who don’t speak English very well, should watch English language television news.  But a recent article in the Washington Post indicates otherwise.

“Schwarzenegger is wrong, and so is this new consensus. The error is particularly obvious in cities with the largest immigrant populations, especially Los Angeles, the town the governor calls home. Schwarzenegger could discover ample evidence of this all by himself — simply by turning on his television.

Extremely well-informed gringo reporter Joe Mathews offered the following:

“On most nights here, the most timely, serious and civic-minded local news is not available on the Internet, the radio or any of the half-dozen English-language stations that broadcast nightly shows that purport to be newscasts. At 11 p.m. each night here, the best newscasts in the market appear on two Spanish-language channels, Univision’s flagship KMEX and Telemundo affiliate KVEA.”

“If immigrants took Schwarzenegger’s advice and flipped off Spanish stations in favor of English-language news, they wouldn’t have nearly as good an idea of what was happening in their adopted city, state and country.”

Mathews goes on to compare one night of newscasts among Los Angeles affiliates of Telemundo and Univision to newscasts on the same night of LA affiliates of CBS, ABC and NBC.

Take a recent night, after a typical day of Los Angeles news. English-language TV led with the weather (it was raining, which is not as unusual as you might think during an L.A. winter), then moved into splashy reports with dramatic footage of a gang shootout and possible hostage situation in a city neighborhood. Less than eight minutes into the newscast, trivia took over. The CBS affiliate’s third piece involved new questions about the death of Marilyn Monroe. The NBC affiliate dwelled on a hepatitis scare at a party for celebrities and swimsuit models, then attempted a brief consumer-oriented investigation about people’s need to replace their tires more frequently. The ABC affiliate gave five minutes to movies and entertainment, from an Oscar preview to a sit-down interview with Jon Stewart.

“In Spanish, viewers got fewer soft features and more deeply reported, longer pieces. KMEX mentioned the gang shootout but provided far more context, interviewing local residents about recent crime and about how local businesses and schools were affected by an hours-long neighborhood lockdown as police searched for a suspect. KMEX also aired a detailed report on a major beef recall from a local firm, a couple of pieces on local politics (including a roundup of what city and county leaders had done that day) and a four-minute examination of key policy issues in the presidential campaign. The Oscars went unmentioned. KVEA’s half-hour newscast, ” En Contexto” (which means what it sounds like), was even more substantive. It gave a thorough review of local political and government news, then delved deeply into nearly 20 minutes of explanation of rising home foreclosures and mortgage problems. (Yes, Spanish-language viewers were callously left to figure out that it was raining all by themselves.)

“This was no fluke. The next night, KMEX broke the news that the LAPD had more Latino officers than white officers, and KVEA ran a piece on the pay and working conditions of security guards. Meanwhile, their English-language rival KABC was finishing another Oscar preview and beginning a heartwarming story involving dogs.

“There’s no comparison in the coverage,” says Josh Kun, a communications professor at the University of Southern California who closely follows Spanish TV. “For people here, there are two places to look for better news: BBC News and Spanish-language news.”

“Why the difference? As English-language news organizations — desperate to stop the declines of their audiences and ad revenues — cut back on news-gathering, they devote their time and resources to entertainment, celebrities, pets and crime (or, best of all, stories that combine all four). But Spanish-language TV producers, who serve a clearly defined, growing audience, have space to tackle weightier topics.

“The result: The sharpest coverage of state and local issues — government, politics, immigration, labor, economics, health care — is now found on Spanish-language TV. They compete hard on serious stories. As a labor reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 2006, the only competitors I routinely saw at major union stories were reporters for KMEX, KVEA and La Opinion, a Spanish-language daily newspaper. These outlets tell their viewers more about how the state and the region work, they are more persistent in demanding explanations from public officials, and their reports routinely include more interviews with more sources from more perspectives.

“The Spanish-language TV broadcasts are, for lack of a better word, more American.

“On a recent night, KVEA did eight minutes on the Iraq war, spent five minutes on deplorable working conditions in Southern California car washes and had reports on narco-traffickers and the latest key legislation in the state legislature and Los Angeles City Hall. Meanwhile, the CBS affiliate had a reporter doing a trend piece on “night spas” that are open until midnight, and ABC was running an item on high-tech fitness equipment.

“It’s enough to make one wonder if it isn’t time for our political leaders to turn off the English-language TV and encourage good citizens to learn Spanish, the language of civic-minded news.

This is no mystery to anyone who gets their news from Spanish-language television.  It has literally been years since I’ve sat down and watched English-language network news shows.  When I do watch news in English, it is from one of the 24-hour cable news channels.  Unfortunately, Mathews left out FOX, whose affiliates in New York, WNYW, offer the most coverage of anything superficial.  Watching the news on WNYW makes me gag.

Mathews also forgot to mention how hard-hitting the morning news can be on Spanish-language television in comparison to that of any English-language news affiliate.

Despite the aforementioned oversights, I think Mathews wrote a great piece, an expose even, that should open the eyes of the non-Hispanic public to the inadequacies of their own TV news shows.

Now, if only Spanish-language news shows could do something about their lack of racial diversity.  I don’t know about the Telemundo or Univision affiliates in other cities, but in New York our Spanish-language news is inexplicably given to the Latino community mostly by blonde-haired blue-eyed anchors with German surnames.  To look at a Univision or Telemundo newscast, you would think they were filming the show not in New York, but perhaps Berlin or Copenhagen.

I’m not sure why these two networks are less willing to hire news staff of color than English-language networks, but it might have something to do with their owners and CEOs: Univision is owned by Haim Saban, an Egyptian Jew who is now an Israeli citizen and Telemundo is owned by NBC and the network’s president is a man named Don Browne.  People forget that you don’t need to be Latino to own or oversee a Spanish-language media company.  You just need a lot of money.  Though both networks were started by Latinos in the 1950s, they have both been sold off to the highest bidder over the years.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Media, Language, Education, Race & Ethnicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.