Boycott Based on 30 Years of Waiting

Poor Malgoscha Gebel, so close to the television industry and so far from reality (“If Perceptions Deceive, It’s Time to Change Them,” Counterpunch, June 5).

The National Hispanic Media Coalition’s boycott of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. is based on a very simple notion: Thirty years after the civil rights movement began, the Latino community has the right to use its economic, political and moral clout to force the television networks to include Latinos and Latino-themed roles in at least some of its programs.

ABC was chosen as the target because Robert Iger, then president of the network, made promises to a group of us in a meeting held in his New York office in June, 1993, that ABC would have a Hispanic-themed prime-time television show by the fall 1994 season, and the network would immediately begin to include Hispanics in more background roles whenever a role was not written for any particular ethnicity or gender. Not only did ABC not meet its stated commitment in 1994, but the fall 1995 lineup is no better.

In her first argument, Gebel attempts to characterize the efforts of the coalition as similar to the acts of a communistic regime. This is exactly the sort of one-sided logic that we have come to expect from an industry that has had no defense for its actions of the past 30 years. Her mischaracterization prompts the question: Is this a democracy where only the industry has the right to freedom of speech and expression?

And while we’re at it, the Latino community hardly has the same power to impose its will as did the working class in Gebel’s native Poland when it was under Communist rule.

Meanwhile, the media can and do censor what the rest of us see on television and at the movies, what we read and what we listen to, through their lock-step control of programming. It’s the same old, same old every night, with only the occasional exception offered by public television or public radio. The freedom the networks and their apologists clamor for is the freedom to offer the same white faces every night on every network instead of making their shows reflect the diversity of America. That’s not freedom of speech or of expression, but the cynical side of censorship.

But Gebel really shows us the extent of her myopia when she proclaims that “there is only one way we can change the situation: from inside!” Why didn’t we think of that? But seriously folks, the failure of this argument is self-evident. Latinos, who compose 38% of this city, 27% of this state and 10% of the country, had only 1% of all speaking roles in prime-time television during the 1992-93 season (according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs), most of the time portraying negative stereotypes.

Despite repeated efforts to penetrate the most invidiously nepotistic, it’s-who-you-know-not-what-you-know industry in this country, we can’t seem to get the networks to see Latinos as anything other than recently arrived maids, gardeners, drug dealers or graffiti-scrawling gang-bangers. Serious roles usually aren’t written for Latino characters. And when they are, non-Latinos are often cast for those roles. Meanwhile, Latino writers never get past the mail room or the internship program. So where is the opportunity to work from the inside?

Gebel’s third argument is that the community has to mobilize to assist those who want to be writers, directors and producers. Maybe she hasn’t kept up with the coalition’s activities, but that’s exactly what we are doing for the talented Latinos who can’t dare say anything negative about an industry that still has a you’ll-never-work-in-this-town-again corporate culture.

Even FCC Commissioner James Quello has endorsed our tactics, stating during a recent speech in Los Angeles at the American Women in Radio and Television Assn.’s convention: “The advertising boycott and the demonstrated public outrage will be more effective than legal action that may not pass court review. Citizen action . . . is what will work.”

What the coalition seeks and what every viewer should demand is television programming as diverse as the community it claims to serve--free of the censorship practiced by the white males who now control television.