TV Does Not Reflect How Life Is in Today’s America

Re: Kim Fleary’s departure from ABC (“ABC Will Take New Risks, New Entertainment President Vows,” Calendar, July 27, and “Briefly,” Business, Aug. 3.) As a Latino, my family, children and friends still await the day when we can watch prime-time television that looks like America. Where ethnic homogeneity is not the rule of the day. Just when it looks like the networks are about to take one step forward we discover that they are all too often taking two steps back.

Kim Fleary, ABC’s vice president of comedy for years, and an African American, has been shown the door with the arrival of the Jamie Tarses regime. This leaves CBS’ Anita Addison and NBC’s Charisse McGhee-Lazarou as the only remaining African Americans at the vice president level in all of network television programming.

Is it any wonder then, given the paucity of non-white executives, that we almost invariably see their white counterparts hiring those who are socially and ethnically in their own image? Isn’t America in 1996 entitled to so much more?

MARCO PEREZ

Van Nuys