For once, accent’s on the news

Latinos have long been a fixture of the local news, dutifully assimilated types who fold themselves into a circus industry of news-o-tainment, genially denying their heritage -- any accent airbrushed -- in the interest of career in a gringo world.

Monday, though, they were thrust into the maelstrom of what was, at heart, a Latino pride day, and the tension this produced made local news something it rarely is: a window into the immediate experience of living here.

There were echoes, throughout, of the way in which Hurricane Katrina turned otherwise objective cable news bobble heads into compassionate eyewitnesses of history. Speaking of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he was in L.A. too, wearing his on-the-ground-with-the-people cargo shirt.

But this “Day Without Immigrants” wasn’t going to be owned by the Coops of the news business. No, to get at the heart of the matter you needed to be watching Fox News Channel 11’s coverage (the best and most contextual of the experience), where reporter Tony Valdez, enveloped in the masses at MacArthur Park, got into a history lesson-cum-shouting match with KFI radio’s “John and Ken.”

“John and Ken” -- both of whom sound like they’ve taken classes at the Adam Carolla Center for the Advancement of the Sarcastic Angry White Guy -- had urged their listeners Monday to hold a counter “Great American Spend-a-Lot” to show that, hey, white people can hunt and gather for food and clothing without anybody’s help.

Kudos to Fox 11 for throwing them on the air as part of the coverage, for it got at one of the more uncomfortable subtexts of the day: White people scared and/or peeved that all these illegals were taking the day off to demand rights.

“Are you seriously saying L.A. has been shut down today?” John guffawed.

What began as dialogue quickly arrived at the rage beneath the surface, with Valdez, patched in from MacArthur Park, endeavoring to give the radio guys a history lesson about manifest destiny and who exactly had been in this country first. In another context, substitute Israelis and Palestinians.

“There’s a statute of limitations on old history,” John shouted. “It’s very convenient for you to do that, I say with respect,” Valdez shot back, “but nevertheless you took this country, you killed people in order to take this country for yourself.”

Can we have a march like this every day? I might actually watch the local news again. The helicopters normally blowing exhaust into the ozone layer to provide raw feed of freeway chases were instead providing a view with substance -- panoramic shots of the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the seven-lane-wide stretch of Wilshire Boulevard from MacArthur Park west to La Brea.

The Mid-Wilshire and Koreatown strip of the boulevard, with its cluster of Art-Deco buildings, churches and grand high-rises, was a telegenic choice for a march of this size, much better than had organizers chosen, say, a march on the Westside, from where the bus drops off undocumented housekeepers in Beverly Hills to where it drops them off in Brentwood.

On the ground, meanwhile, Latino TV newspeople were actually daring to speak Spanish on the air, and not just to show they could pronounce “Vladimir Guerrero” correctly.

“Que dice usta a la gente que dice que los illegales son criminales -- I’m asking her what she says to the people who call illegal aliens criminals,” said Fox’s Gigi Graciette, translating for the non-speakers (of Spanish) watching at home.

The quotient of Latinos on local TV news has always been a somewhat spotty gauge of local demographics, as it is for other immigrants groups here. For every Dunphy, Moyer or Martin there has always been a Maclovio Perez, one-time weatherman fixture at KNXT/KCBS, or a Carlos Amezcua, current co-anchor of KTLA Channel 5 morning news. But they’re only subtly ethnic in a market where the message is, sound like us or perish.

“Personally, I think there is a place in TV news for those with accents, as long as they’re easy to understand and have all of the other obvious qualities of being a professional broadcaster,” Ron Fineman, the local news observer who blogs at ronfineman.com, wrote in 1999, after KTLA hired its Latina weekend sports anchor, Claudia Trejos. “In her case I think I’m hearing an attempt to over-pronounce, because she’s certainly aware of her accent.”

During her short tenure, Trejos’ problems, as Fineman noted at the time, had more to do with job skills than ethnicity; otherwise, as a hot Latina she fit the bill. See UPN Channel 13’s Lauren Sanchez. See Fox News’ Gina Silva. “As the daughter of migrant farm workers, Gina Silva remembers watching her mother and father work under the grueling sun, picking vegetables for little money and often being cheated for their work,” says Silva’s bio on Fox 11’s website. “It was a life she wanted to escape and a fate she was determined to change.”

I didn’t see Silva during Monday’s coverage, though I’m told she worked on this “Day Without Immigrants.” Probably, as seemingly every reporter did, she went up to a marcher and asked, “Why are you here?” and caught a piece of their story, and made the Southland -- from Santa Ana to Miracle Mile -- feel that much more like an actual place.