Immigration Seldom Covered By Latinos In Top Newspapers
By Roque Planas, Huffington Post Latino Voices
White, non-Hispanic journalists wrote a whopping 98.2 percent front page articles this year in major U.S. newspapers, according to data compiled by Fourth Estate, a group that tracks information about media. Only a miniscule 0.2 percent of journalists writing front-page newspaper features on immigration were Latino, according to the figures gathered from Jan. 1 to Oct. 12.
Latinos didn’t fare well covering other topics either. Hispanic journalists wrote even fewer features on foreign policy and other social issues, while scoring marginally higher (1.2 percent) on the economy. Latinos penned 5 percent of the features at the San Diego Union-Tribune — the highest share at any of the 15 dailies examined.
Critics have pointed to lack of diversity in newsrooms as part of the reason behind the mass media’s continued use of the term “illegal immigrant” — an expression that nearly half of the Hispanic population finds offensive, according to a Fox News Latino poll released this year.
“I want to know who is in the style meetings and how diverse those meetings are,”journalist Maria Hinojosa said on MSNBC’s “Up with Chris Hayes,” referring …
This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.
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