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Jewish World Review June 20, 2005 / 13 Sivan , 5765 What's a Latino reporter to do? By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Fort Worth, Texas — I recently got a call from a young woman at Stanford University who was completing a master's degree in media studies. She had decided to do her thesis on a subject close to my heart: Latino columnists.
She said she intended to interview as many Latino columnists as she could find, but she couldn't find many.
You don't say?
The numbers are dreadful. Latinos — who now make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population — still make up only about 3 percent of print journalists. And they account for an even smaller percentage of opinion journalists. And let's not forget that this is a profession that delights in lecturing society's institutions — from police departments to medical schools to Fortune 500 companies — about the virtues of diversity.
The graduate student wanted to know what it was like to be a Latino columnist. Do I feel a responsibility to represent the Latino community? (Absolutely not.) What is the reaction from readers? (Anywhere from enthusiastic to apoplectic.) Do I ever encounter racism? (Only on days that end in "y.") And what can newspapers do to attract Latino readers? (Try hiring more Latino writers.)
The call brought to mind a lunch I had about five years ago with a veteran columnist in Washington. It was right before I started this column, and the veteran offered some advice — and then offered his sympathies.
"It must be very difficult," he said, "to constantly feel as if you have to serve a constituency."
What he meant was that, as a Latino columnist, I must feel as though I have to advance the views of Latino organizations and Latino elected officials, both of which, in his experience, tended to lean to the left.
Actually, I responded, if there is a constituency (and I'm not sure there is), I'm not sure I'm up to the task of serving it. Latino leaders and I disagree on immigration enforcement, bilingual education, affirmative action, capital punishment, school vouchers and privatizing Social Security. And that's just for starters.
Besides, the most demanding constituencies out there aren't ethnic or racial, but ideological. The far left and the far right seem to agree on only one thing: They want 100 percent of the population to agree with them 100 percent of the time. Ideologues don't read columns for information so they know what to think as much as for affirmation of what they already believe.
This doesn't have a thing to do with being Latino. It has to do with being human and living in an era when the politics are all-or-nothing.
Which is not to say that Latino journalists don't bring a unique and valuable perspective to reporting on the news and offering commentary. It's often the case that they do, and the profession — and, by extension, the country — is better for it.
Their ethnicity doesn't completely define them. At least it shouldn't. But like one's social class, educational background or a small town upbringing, it's something that helps form the lens through which they see the issues of the day.
About that, I don't expect to get much of an argument from any of the more than 2,000 Latino Journalists from the United States and Latin America in North Texas this week for the 23rd annual conference of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
It was the veteranos in this business — people like the late Frank Del Olmo of the Los Angeles Times — who first broke through the ranks.
But the Latino journalists of today have, in many ways, broken the mold. Many have graduate degrees, they're experienced and faced with tons of options. They're confident in their abilities and what they have to offer — to prospective employers and the rest of society.
And what is that exactly? The ability to tell good stories, to explain changes that America is experiencing and put them in context, to decode the complexities of a population that is becoming larger and more significant, and, not least of all, to express passions, perspectives and points of view that might not come out otherwise.
And with all that on their plates, who has time to serve a constituency?
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Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
