Jose and Jorge: Latino news and Latinos in the news

*A compelling explanation about why Jorge Ramos and Jose Diaz-Balart are media anachronisms. Mainstream media doesn’t get it, and Ramos and Diaz-Balart don’t help. VL


By Aaron Sanchez,Commentary & Cuentoscommentary_&_cuentos

It is no longer surprising to find Latinos in the news.  Fluctuating demographics and Republican rhetoric regularly bring attention to the fact that Latinos are part of a changing nation.  It is rare, however, to find Latino newsmen as the topic of headlines.  Recently, the two of the highest-profile Latino newsmen have made the news themselves—José Díaz-Balart and Jorge Ramos.  Díaz-Balart’s MSNBC show, The Rundown, is set for cancellation as the network makes more room for Joe Scarborough’s Morning Joe.  Ramos garnered immediate attention for his exchange with Donald Trump in Iowa, where he was forcefully removed and told to “go back to Univision.”  Later, in the hallway, a Trump supporter would tell Ramos to “get out of my country.”  Ramos, a U.S. citizen, tried to explain that he was in his country, but the supporter refused to acknowledge that fact.

The coverage of the exchange moved away from Ramos’ engaged insistence that politicians tackle immigration reform, toward Ramos himself.  Terry Gross had Ramos on Fresh Air, where he acknowledged she would not have him as a guest if it was not for the episode.  The New Yorker wrote a feature on him, calling him “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down.”  The altercation even garnered international attention, acclaimed Mexican journalist, Carmen Aristegui,commented that “[Ramos] is controversial and some think that he is too aggressive, but I think he is a valuable journalist.”

[pullquote]The media coverage of Ramos and the ousting of Díaz-Balart speak to the problems of underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Latinos in the media. [/pullquote]

Mainstream is still oblivious

The ousting of Díaz-Balart has been criticized by Latinos in the media and outside of it.  Díaz-Balart was the only Latino host at MSNBC and his time-slot was given to Joe Scarborough.  Interestingly, when analyzing the Trump-Ramos confrontation, Scarborough concluded that Ramos was merely looking for his “15 minutes of fame.”  He was oblivious to the fact that Ramos was both more famous and had an audience six times larger than his.

The media coverage of Ramos and the ousting of Díaz-Balart speak to the problems of underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Latinos in the media.  The Latino population is growing and many major industries have been trying to cater to the growing “Latino market.”  Some have been more successful than others, like the recent Coca-Cola tattoo can issued in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month.  It seems like the mainstream media have decided to neglect the Latinos.  Latino voters will become increasingly influential as their population grows; a Latino turns 18 years old every 30 seconds.  This makes getting Latinos the news important and makes Latinos delivering the news equally important.

[pullquote]There are very few voices of color on radio and even fewer Latino voices, and even fewer Latino voices speaking in English. [/pullquote]

Even public radio “sounds white”

Unfortunately, people of color in general are underrepresented both as hosts and commentators on all of the major Sunday morning talk shows. [tweet_dis] A study by Media Matters found white men comprise the majority of guests on all major news shows, ranging by network from 55 to 67 percent.[/tweet_dis]   The issue is not limited to just major cable and network news.  [tweet_dis]According to a study in the Columbia Journalism Review, Latinos are only 4.1 percent of newspaper reporters in the country.[/tweet_dis]  Public radio has a similar problem, not only being overwhelmingly white, but also “sounding white.”  There are very few voices of color on radio and even fewer Latino voices, and even fewer Latino voices speaking in English.  Díaz-Balart and Ramos both started in Spanish language media.  Ramos especially is connected to the issues of immigration.  He sees it as his journalistic duty to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform and for immigrants themselves.  Being associated with an issue is not necessarily bad, except that Latinos are rarely seen on major news outlets.  When they are, it is in connection to immigration.  This gives the false impression that Latinos are all immigrants.

[pullquote]”… to be a Walter Cronkite in the twenty-first century in an age of Twitter, Facebook, and internet media outlets is to be a revered anachronism.”[/pullquote]

Underrepresentation and misrepresentation in the news is what makes Ramos and Díaz-Balart so important and problematic.  They are the voices of and the voices for the Latino community.  Yet, they represent an aging generation and speak to a shrinking population.  While the Latino population is increasingly young and native-born, their appeal skews older.  For Ramos, his audience tends to be Spanish-speaking and more likely immigrant.   He is largely associated with issue of immigration.  The problem is also in their format, primetime or large cable news shows.  Ramos is commonly referred to as a Latino “Walter Cronkite,” an honorific meant to bestow prestige on the nightly news anchor for the fifth biggest channel in the U.S. But to be a Walter Cronkite in the twenty-first century in an age of Twitter, Facebook, and internet media outlets is to be a revered anachronism, detached from the realities of the present moment and the populations that live in them.  He has an audience, an undeniably large audience.  What Ramos does not have: the children of his current audience.  They most likely were watching John Stewart’s Daily Show, or even Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show.  They most certainly recognize both Ramos and Díaz-Balart from their parents’ TV screens; they respect them but they do not relate to them.

[pullquote][tweet_dis]What Jorge Ramos does not have: the children of his current audience.[/tweet_dis][/pullquote]

Assistant_Secretary_Fernandez_Chats_With_Univision's_Jorge_Ramos_derivative_work (1)

Ramos was born into a middle-class Mexican family in Mexico City.  Frustrated by familial, clerical, and governmental authority, he left Mexico with a university education to work in the U.S.  Díaz-Balart is the child of Cuban refugees, a Latino community with a very different history than any other Latino group in the U.S.  Cubans benefitted from the privileges of the Cuban Adjustment Act that normalized their status in the nation and gave them a path to citizenship.  These two distinct experiences set the leading Latino newsmen apart; their perspectives and cultural references points are different from the rest of the growing community.

When thinking about the rising U.S.-Latino generation, Díaz-Balart and Ramos stick out.  [tweet_dis]Junot Diaz, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Al Madrigal, Cristela Alonzo, Daniel Chacon, Emmy Perez, America Ferrera, and many others represent a generation whose polyglot code-switching transcends Ramos’ bilingualism. [/tweet_dis] Theirs is a code-switching that is more than linguistic; it is a postcolonialism of muted-but-not-muffled politics and a cultural hybridity that bridges American cult-classics and transnational epistemologies.  This can be seen in Miranda’s marriage of musicals and hip-hop, informed by American culture but transformed by the experience of being Latino in the U.S.—in his recounting the “Founding Fathers” were people of color.  Diaz seamlessly tells the complex story of Dominican history with Lord of the Rings allusions, all of which is tied together under the title of a book that is an homage to the19th century British playwright and author Oscar Wilde, with a Dominican accent of course.

Ramos and Diaz-Balart don’t get it

These two generations speaking past one another can be seen in what was supposed to be a funny exchange between comedian Al Madrigal and Ramos in his documentary Half Like Me (starting around 6:12-7:00).  Ramos belittles Madrigal’s Spanish and his accent, finding it strange that Madrigal cannot pronounce his Spanish surname correctly.  Ramos believes, only half-jokingly, that if only Madrigal could pronounce his last name correctly, his “identity crisis” would be solved.  Madrigal’s quixotic quest to understand what it means to be a Latino in the U.S.—a U.S.-Latino—is confused by Ramos and many others before him as a lack of culture.  Ramos, in the clip, certainly builds upon the tradition of Mexican public intellectuals seeing Mexican-Americans as pochos, agringados, or sad wannabe Americans.  In 1926, the exiled Mexican journalist, Conrado Espinoza, wrote that Mexican-Americans were “families that, in terms of appearance, have lost their Mexican identity and are in terms of language (horrible Spanish and horrible English), in terms of their customs (grotesque and licentious), in terms of their desires (futile and fatuous ambition); a hybrid group which adapts itself neither in this country nor in our own.”  In 1931, Manuel Gamio wrote that Mexican-Americans were “people without a country.”  According to Octavio Paz in 1950, the Mexican-American “does not want to become a Mexican again; at the same time he does not want to blend into the life of North America.  His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma.”  Paz concluded that the entirety of Mexican-American culture was nothing but “a suicidal gesture.”

Diaz-Balart and Ramos are anachronistically situated in an increasingly generational and cultural divide. 

They are Cronkites—certainly deserving of their journalistic reputations—but they run the risk of becoming Don Franciscos, whose presence and shows a young generation remembers associated with their parents but that none of them tuned-in to watch—maybe even a little embarrassed to watch.  They are men with privileged experiences as immigrants that have made them sympathetic to the plight of immigrants, but their futures and their perspectives have an expiration date.  Large news networks, newspapers, and outlets need U.S.-Latinos, comfortable with the requisite code switching of a generation born into a transnational world.  There are already places where this work is being done, LatinoRebels.com, NewsTaco.com, Pocho.com, and LatinoUSA, among others.  But we need more.  We need more than just José y Jorge.

This article was originally published in Commentary & Cuentos.


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Aaron E. Sanchez is the editor of Commentary and Cuentos, a blog focused on issues of race, politics, and popular culture from a Latino perspective. The posts place these issues in historical, cultural, and intellectual context to better understand our present. Aaron received his Ph.D. in history from Southern Methodist University. He is a happy husband, proud father, and an avid runner.

[Ramos and Diaz-Balart photos via Wikimedia Commons]
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