Latino coverage is still scant

Last year fewer than 1% of news reports on the three major television networks and CNN were about Latinos or Latino-related issues, according to a report released Thursday at the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists’ annual convention in Fort Worth. That percentage has remained nearly constant in the last 10 years.

The year’s “Brownout” report tabulated news stories on ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN, classifying 115 reports in 2004 as Latino-related out of an estimated 16,000 overall. The figure, 0.72%, was a slight drop from 2003, when the four networks studied ran 131 Latino-related stories, or 0.82%.

The scant attention given Latino issues by network news organizations “continues to be appalling,” said Federico Subervi, a journalism professor and media consultant who co-wrote the study. The study also noted that news stories about Latinos focus mostly on crime and immigration, and tend to treat Latinos as a monolithic group.

But the authors of the study acknowledged that the prevalence of Latinos in news reports on other cable news channels and Spanish-language newscasts was not studied and thus a more complete survey remains to be done.

*

Daniel Hernandez