Where are Latinos? Not on TV news or in the newspaper

Commentary

By Wanda S. Lloyd
Executive director, Freedom Forum Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University

12.26.01

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"Come, look! Colored on TV!"

Those were the urgent words of my grandmother in the 1950s and 1960s, a time before we referred to ourselves as black or African American. It was the call to our family — and many families like ours — when the rare person of color would show up on entertainment or news shows.

It was so rare that family members would come running from whatever we were doing and huddle around the small black-and-white screen for the joy of seeing someone who looked like us.

Often, joy would go to sadness if the person we were watching was the victim or suspect in a crime. But we still would watch, spellbound, to see the images of people of color on the screen.

We watched because seeing someone like us on television gave us pride and positive self images. We watched because we suspected that with each episode of the drama “Julia,” or interview with someone like Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, or speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whites who watched would somehow gain another iota of racial tolerance and respect for African-Americans in their own community.

Today, if you happen to be Hispanic and living in the United States, don’t look for yourself on the nightly television news. Chances are, you, or someone like you, are not there.

A study has found that little more than half of 1% of all news stories on network and CNN evening news broadcasts in 2000 were about Latinos, except for stories about Cuban citizen Elián González. (The González stories were excluded from the main count.)

The survey, released by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, shows that out of 16,000 news stories that aired on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, only 84, or 0.53%, were about Latinos in 2000. This number is down from 1999, when 1.3% of total news stories were about Latinos. (CNN stories were not counted in the 1999 survey.)

Hispanics, the fastest-growing group in the United States in the past decade, are now the nation’s largest racial or ethnic minority, surpassing the number of African-Americans, according to the Census Bureau. Hispanics increased from 22 million to 35 million between 1990 and 2000.

The NAHJ survey also found that portrayals of Hispanics in TV news are often stereotypical, not in line with the realities of Latino societies and cultures.

My grandmother’s call to television was mirrored when she read the daily newspaper. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to make that call very often. Most references to African-Americans in our paper were negative — crime stories and obituaries (segregated, of course).

That has changed today. Although readers can find a fair number of newspapers that routinely run mug shots of black criminal suspects in prominent places, on Page One or the local-news front, there is more emphasis and training on mainstreaming people of color into the news. For the most part, newspaper staffs are much more focused on covering black communities completely — including the positive ways as well as the negative. More African-American experts are sought as expert news sources.

However, except in cities with extremely high numbers of Latino residents, where are Latinos in our newspapers? Where are the positive role models for Latino children? More specifically, where are Latinos in our newsrooms?

The 2001 newsroom census by the American Society of Newspaper Editors also showed a decline of Hispanics. In 2000, the number of Hispanics working in daily newspaper newsrooms declined to 3.66% from 3.68% in 1999. These small numbers fly in the face of the growth of that segment of the population.

I bet my grandmother would have expected more progress on TV and in newspapers in the 21st century.

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