Race and Ethnic Relations in Today's America by Greg Oswald

Author:Greg Oswald [Oswald, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Discrimination, Ethnic Studies, General
ISBN: 9781351753951
Google: XNqiDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 39232662
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Other Minorities

There is another type of alternative media that in its own way has come to challenge the dominance of mainstream journalism and programming. This is the rise of the Spanish language media, which has developed by leaps and bounds in step with the growth of the Latino population in the U.S. Whereas in the 1960s, virtually everything was broadcast in English, today there are about fifty television and hundreds of radio stations whose programming is completely in Spanish. Hispanics also have their own cable TV networks. One of them, Univision, claims over four hundred affiliated stations. Spanish language radio and television do not challenge the ‘Anglo’ media along overtly political lines, but by emphasising different aspects of an event they do help make the United States appear a less self-absorbed country. Thus when in the mid-1990s the mainline English language networks were covering in almost microscopic detail the goings on in connection with the O.J. Simpson murder case, Univision and its cable rival Telemundo were featuring less sensational but more significant items about Latin America to their viewers. Even when they cover the same stories as ABC, NBC and CBS, they do so in a different manner. Accounts tend to be longer, with more depth than is usually seen on the English language networks. In part, this is a matter of economics. The Spanish language media have less money than the established national networks. As there are fewer reporters to fill in the same amount of airtime, each story is of necessity longer. But the greater length is also attributable to the traditions of Latin American journalism, which are more analytical and relay a stronger point of view than does the U.S. variety.

In some respects, Asian Americans and Hispanics are now at the same stage of network media representation as blacks were in the 1950s and 1960s. They do hold a reasonable share of newscasting and reporting posts, something that did not apply to African Americans a few decades ago. But they continue to be relegated to relatively minor and stereotyped parts in serialised programmes. For example, a 1998 survey revealed that less than 4% of the leading prime time television roles that season involved Latinos, even though they made up 11% of the population.42 Most Hispanics are portrayed as poor immigrants. Asian American men tend to be cast in an unsexual light and so hardly ever get any lead roles. There has yet to be either a prominently positioned Spanish- or Asian American series on any of the mainstream networks as happened for blacks in the first half of the 1990s. The reason these networks have yet to apply such offerings to America’s other minority groups is largely market induced. In the case of Asian Americans, analysts say, it is because their numbers are about only a third that of the black population. In the case of Hispanics, it is because an estimated forty per cent, do not watch English language television.43 Furthermore, neither Latino nor Asian culture is as familiar to the rest of the country as is black culture.

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