PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : Media, Beware: L.A.’s Invisible Majority Is Giving Up Its Silence

When Latino leaders criticize the media--from news to movies and television--for their characterization of their community, they echo the feelings of most Latinos in the United States. They know it is the media that sets the trends that will determine whether Latinos are largely ignored or stereotyped.

That Latinos, which make up 40% of the city’s population, must struggle--some of them starve--to get a Chicano Studies Department at UCLA underscores the consequences of being ignored by the media. That Latinos are mostly viewed as problem people--usually as gang members, occasional looters or as illegal immigrants--is an example of the lasting power of media stereotyping.

This problem-people characterization, which is the handmaiden of economic and social discrimination, has haunted the Latino community for what seems like an eternity. It even extends to the Spanish-language media, albeit with some notable exceptions. The obsessive drum beat of Latinos as gang members has the same effect, whether you broadcast it in English or in Spanish.

Lately, events and discussions marking the first anniversary of last year’s riots have shown just how deeply embedded is this negative portrayal of Latinos in news-gathering strategies. Last month in Dallas, I was a participant in a conference on how television news covered the Los Angeles riots. Erna Smith of San Francisco State, a participant, said her findings indicated that TV news departments had tended to cast each ethnic group in a distinctive role and never reported anything that challenged the assigned image.

African-Americans, according to Smith, were usually portrayed as the aggressors in the riots; Anglos as the victims; Korean-Americans as, alternatively, victims and gun-toting vigilantes, and Latinos as looters. The conflict was mainly portrayed as one between African-Americans and everybody else.

This kind of superficial coverage diminishes all of us, but Latinos feel especially aggrieved. They are, after all, the largest minority in the city and, as such, very much a part of the fabric of L.A. life. Yet, the ordinary, hard-working and law-abiding Latino remains invisible to the general public. The consequences of this existential denial are dangerous not only for Latinos but for society.

Racial type-casting by the media also infects how issues are perceived--hence, addressed. For example, reporting that narrows the question of police brutality to one of African-Americans complaining about white officers is grossly misleading. Indeed, the greatest number of police-brutality complaints in the Los Angeles area are filed by Latinos. If a problem that glaring in the Latino community can be marginalized by the media, it is unlikely ever to be solved.

A year after the riots, nobody precisely knows how many Latino businesses were destroyed, burned or looted during the riots. According to estimates, between 30% and 60% of all businesses damaged were Latino-owned. It naturally--and sadly--follows that nobody knows how many loan applications from Latinos have been accepted, or rejected, by the Small Business Administration or the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But everybody knows that more Latinos were arrested during the riots than any other ethnic group. How many were arrested for misdemeanors, such as curfew violations, or how many were detained for felonies, such as arson, is anybody’s guess. Only the Immigration and Naturalization Service knows exactly how many were deported. Only the Corrections Department knows how many were jailed. The media, most notably The Times in a recently published computer study of riot-arrest statistics, have barely begun to seek out answers.

If such key questions about the Latino community can, in effect, be shelved even after as big and tragic an event as the riots, what does this suggest about how the media report on the everyday issues that affect Latinos? Can the education needs of Latino children be addressed, for example, when 62% of the student population of the city’s schools is ignored? Not likely! And what kind of effect will that ignorance have on the future of our city?

In trying to explain why the mob burned the library at Alexandria, “the greatest city the Western world had ever seen,” Carl Sagan said: “There is no record, in the entire history of the library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited (the vast population of the city) little.”

A similar disregard for the established order in Los Angeles is possible as long as the city’s Latinos are ignored or exclusively viewed by the media as problem people. It’s long past time for the media to fully and cleanly accept a thriving community.