News Programs Need To Make Latino Representation A Priority
*Agreed, but we’ve been saying this since the ’80’s. “Demanding” more representation hasn’t worked. That’s why we started NewsTaco, to do it ourselves. VL
By Christina López G., Media Matters (4 minute read) 
The Latino population is growing at the second-fastest rate in the country, meaning that the United States of the future will be increasingly Hispanic. But for television news, 2016 was a year in which Latinos were underrepresented — even in conversations about Latinos — misidentified, or simply not included.
In 2015, the number of Latinos in the United States grew to 57 million, and yet, during 2016, television news continued the disturbing pattern from previous years of marginalizing Latino voices in cable news discussions. This creates a blindspot in news media and marginalizes Latinos from discussions on the American experience. Latinos were even underrepresented or altogether ignored in discussions of stories that intimately affected the Hispanic community.
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When President-elect Donald Trump expressed doubts that federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel could objectively do his job because of his Mexican ethnic heritage, many Latinos could have provided insights from their lived experiences, sharing stories about having similar doubts cast upon their ability to do their jobs, or about their accent or the sound of their names making them victims of labor discrimination. And yet, in cable news discussions of Trump’s attacks on Curiel, only 11.5 percent of the guests who were asked to provide analysis were Hispanic.
[Photo by Darron Birgenheier/Flickr]
