Title: Hispanics in National Nightly News

Two sentence summary of findings:
I watched a week of NBC Nightly News and ABC Nightly News. Each broadcast had an average of 11 stories and of 118 stories only one included a story in where a Hispanic woman was just interviewed, but the story was not about her.

Summary of the previous study:
I got this idea from Federico Subervi, a professor at Texas State University in San Marcos. He came to the University of North Texas last year and I wrote an article about his lecture. He stated the results of his quantitative and qualitative study, he found that in 100 stories on national news broadcasts on the main channels such as ABC, NBC and CBS, only one story was about a Latino. Of those stories, most were about immigration, gangs, violence or other subjects that put Latinos in a bad point of view. Subervi has created LAMP or Latinos and Media Project to study Latinos in the media to see when they are included in stories, how they are included in stories and how often. LaMP was launched in 1997 thanks to a seed grant by the National Council of La Raza and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
According to Elena Sadler and her project, only two Hispanics appeared as experts on the main stories on the news broadcast, which were brain cell surgery and gender equity. She claims that not all of the news was bad as Hispanics appeared as experts in stories related to Hispanics five times, which is considerable improvement since 1994 when it was none. Hispanics have also appeared on camera as interview subjects in more than half of the stories aired about them, an improvement since 1995 and 1996. Even though NBC has been praised for its Hispanic diversification efforts, increasing from 4% in 1996 to 16% in 1998 and contributing to the highest rated newscast with diversity, CBS aired the most stories on Hispanics with 47 stories while ABC had 38 and NBC had 27. She based all her information from studies done by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

Corpus and method:
My corpus comprises of watching the NBC and ABC Nightly News for about a week starting Sunday November 11 and ending Sunday November 18. The method I used is a quantitative and qualitative content analysis, in which I wrote down the subject of the news story, the main reporter, the people interviewed and any other camera shots. The qualitative content analysis was counting the number of Hispanics as reporters, interviewees or in camera shots. Afterwards, of those stories where they were included, I did a qualitative content analysis to discuss the actual news stories they were included in.

Findings:
I tried to watch both every day, but I occasionally missed a few. However, I watched enough news so that I had 118 news stories, 18 stories over the 100 Subervi used in his research. Of those 118 news stories, only one had a Hispanic woman, Mary Detros, heavily interviewed on NBC Nightly News. She was complaining about the cost of her trailer home FEMA gave her after Hurricane Katrina. The story reflected her as a poor Hispanic woman forced to live in a trailer that is costing every one else in taxes as they were originally were built for $14,000, but are costing $229,000 to maintain. The only other news story where another Hispanic woman was mentioned on NBC Nightly News was the college student, Muriel Gallo, who caused controversy as she asked Hilary Clinton a planted question at a campaign rally. Two Hispanic reporters, Jim Avila of ABC Nightly News and Carl Quintanilla had a total of three stories. Jim Avila covered the Barry Bonds controversy of whether he lied under oath about steroids on November 15 and again on November 16. Carl Quintanilla covered bargain hunting for during the holiday season on that same night.

Conclusions:
According to the US Census in 2004, 41.3 million Hispanics live in the United States. With all of these Hispanics here, how did I struggle to find just one news story? I watched a whole week of two different broadcasts, but the only story was about a Hispanic woman who did not like the expenses of her FEMA trailer home. To put the amount of stories about Hispanics into even more shame, there was a huge story on NBC Nightly News on November 16 about Indians in Quebec. Native Americans are rarely in the news or in advertisements, and here while I research I watch a huge story about how they are trying to improve their image and keep kids focused and struggle to find just one story about Hispanics. If I had just waited two weeks, I would have had all the stories that I needed with this Miss Puerto Rico scandal. These stories are giving not only beauty pageants, but Hispanic woman a bad stereotype of being devious to do anything to win a crown. Plus, the results of her accusations of pepper spray came back negative, so now she looks like a liar. In conclusion, I got the same results as Federico Subervi and I wish I hadn’t. With Hispanics becoming the majority in some areas of the country, one would think that would reflect on the news instead of just on Hispanic news stations.

References:
Sadler, Elena. "In the Media." Hispanics in the Media: Making Waves In The United States. Spring 2000. 3 Dec 2007 http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring2000/Sadler/default.html.

Subervi, Federico. "Latinos and Media Project." Latinos and Media Project. 2007. 7 Dec 2007 http://www.latinosandmedia.org/.

Unknown. "Facts for Features ." US Census. September 8, 2005. 7 Dec 2007 .

Week 14: Bring a movie to class!

For class I brought "Hairspray" the musical. This movie is an AMAZING musical with great singing, acting, dancing and a great message. It takes place in Baltimore 1962 with the focus on an "American Bandstand"-type of show, "The Corny Collins Show", where every day nice, white kids dance to the hit songs and once a month they have "Negro Day." This was a time where TV was segregated and would never be integrated.

The songs start with giving the major issue a light and fluffy feeling, but by the middle, as the blacks march to integrate the TV show show the struggle for equal rights. The beginning introduces the difference between whites and black in 1960s with different songs about their lives. They also talk about how whites took the black artist's song and remade them to make them more popular than the original song. In one scene in the movie, it shows the white girls singing the song then transitioned into "Negro Day" with their girls singing the same song. The producer complains to the host of "Negro Day" that they stole the song they sang on the regular show and she responds with "But they're the ones who wrote it."

In the end, the struggle ends and the show is integrated. With the different ending shots, the movie concludes with the world changing as people who are different are being represented in television whether it's an overweight girl who just wants to be famous or blacks on TV along with the "normal" skinny, gorgeous white teenagers. I HIGHLY recommend everyone go see the movie. Plus, you can see John Travolta in drag.

Week 12: Chapter 2

The quote in the discussion section of the chapter sums up movie trailers in general: "The object of nearly every trailer is to get teenage boys' butts into seats...And that means going for as much violence and sex as you can jam into 2 1/2 minutes" (Streisand, 1999, p. 56).

In my observations, the trailers usually have all the sex and violence and sometimes it's the only sexual or violent scenes in the whole movie. With at least five movies coming out each weekend, movie producers have to make sure that people will chose their movies to watch by grabbing their attention with the trailers. Movie producers also make different versions of the movies to include different scenes or to try to appeal to different audiences.

I've noticed this with the "Sweeney Todd" trailers. The movie is coming out Christmas day, which is one of the biggest days for movies to come out, so it will be competing with other movies being released and those already in theaters. So far I've seen three different trailers to focus to three different audiences: female, male and musical fans. One of the first trailers showed mainly shots of Johnny Depp to grab the female fans of all things Johnny Depp. These shots included intense gazes and him looking hot to attract the female audience that may have no idea about the story or musical of "Sweeney Todd." Another trailer shows the violence of Sweeney Todd and how he murders people for revenge to attract the male audience. The final trailer includes more singing and songs to attract the musical theater fans. Many of them were nervous for this movie because Stephen Sondheim is one of the composers who create very hard musicals to sing and Johnny Depp had constantly said he could never sing. With these trailers, the musical theater fans can see that he and the other actors could sing and that Tim Burton was taking an interesting approach to the musical.

Trailers will continue to cram as much violence and sex to grab people's attention to come back to the movie theaters for their movie. They will also have different trailers to appeal to all audiences.

Week 11: Spike Lee Films

In class we watched Spike Lee's "Bamboozled." Even though at times when the jokes seemed real and it was uncomfortable, I really liked it. It took people's stereotypes and forced us to really look at them. At first, they're funny, but to me, they eventually stop being funny and I start thinking if I stereotype people like that as well.

The main stereotypes of characters in this movie I find myself thinking at times are the white guy thinking he's black and the black guy who tries way to hard to make him sound intelligent. For the white producer, he pretends to connect with his black employees and co-workers. His office is full of all products and poster of black. He talks "ghetto." I'm sorry, but that's the most annoying thing ever. I just want to go up to people like that and say, "Sir. You did NOT grow up in the ghetto, but probably in a nice middle-class white community. Please stop trying to be black."

The other stereotype I struggled with is the black person who tries waaay too hard to sound intelligent. I definitely have a friend like that and I just want to say, " I know that you are intelligent. Now stop explaining things to me like I'm not understanding you. You are belittling me." It's like they're trying so hard to prove everyone wrong about the stereotype, but I know that people go to school then college and can hold an intelligent conversation with anyone. Even though it's not explored in this movie, Hispanics are also known to do this to try to convince everyone around them that they do not fit that stereotype.

The movie also discusses how audiences don't really have a mind of their own, but follow what is popular. At first, they protested the show, but then they were told that it was OK to watch the show. Afterwards, the show took off and every one was watching it and really getting into the show such as the live audience who even went black face themselves. On the subject of black face, I'm still shocked that it was OK and the norm to do black face until the 1950s and that huge stars such as Fred Astaire did it. In one of his movies (I think it was "Swing Time") he does a huge black face dance with back up dancers in the same. If that movie was created today, it would be protested, but back then, no one thought twice about it.

Week 10: Chapters 3 and 4

Chapter 3:

In class we discussed the typology of artists. With the typology of artists most go through "sexuality as metamorphosis" going from being a teenage girl to a woman. The artists' videos also can be fantasy fulfillment and power. Then we talked about the story techniques of the videos based on camera work/angles and editing. The camera angles disturb me at time because it offends me that with the angles, women seem like objects and mannequins, just there to make the artist look good. This degrade of women is one of the main reason why I don't like or listen to rap--that and the lyrics are absolutely horrible. I guess that's why the saying is: "you can't spell crap with out rap."

I really like the quote that "sexuality is a much more prominent feature, with videos continually pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. Near nudity, lesbian chic, and (compared to network television) more-than-suggestive depictions of sexual activity abound. Thus, many artists attempt to compete for airplay, media attention, and record sales by exploiting their sexuality to greater degrees." In most videos on television today, the material is extremely suggestive or flat out obvious. It's a shame that most girls can't just sing and have a normal video, but instead they have to be scantly clad and surrounded by men, trying to get their attention by her choreography or siren-like voice. To me, it seems that videos and artist constantly toe the line and try to push the line for what can be allowed and what can be censored. I remember when certain curse words would be blocked out, but now only a few get bleeped out and the videos are easily seen unedited online.

Chapter 4:

In my opinion, video games are getting out of control. I agree with the authors in that these games are giving wrong gender impressions to pre-teen and teenage boys. Girls are viewed as vixens that are damsels in distress that need strong, steroid-taking men to save them. I wish that video games would be a simple as just the Mario series that I used to play. In my house, we weren't allowed video games, but were only allowed educational computer games. The only bad thing about Mario was the Princess Peach character originally had to be rescued, but with Mario Party games, you could compete against the boys with Princess Peach and actually beat them.
The violence in our schools have definitely increased. Although I don't believe there is a cause and effect of violence in video games and violence in real life, I do think that they can add to it. Parents are naive and give their children games without looking at the rating or knowing the content. Personally, I think kids should stick with the old school Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego and Math Treasure Storm. Those are the good ol' games and the only violence/evil you could do was to not cure your enemy of a broken arm on Oregon Trail. Oh well...maybe we can start banning extremely violent games like in Europe.

Week 9: Absence to Advertising

While reading the chapter about advertising in our book I was shocked by the actual statistics about the lack of minorities in advertising. An example was that the Native American statistics weren't talked about because they were practically nonexistent. It seems to me that advertising does not reflect the actual world as most people are skinny, gorgeous and airbrushed white male and female models. Unless the actual company or product are gear towards minorities, they are not in any advertisements. People with disabilities, elderly and the poor are rarely shown in mainstream advertising and are almost absent completely. The only time that these people are portrayed are for products that target those type of customers. Usually these advertisements don't put them in a good light, but instead show them either as something "normal" people pity or ways to improve their lives with this product with disabilities and age.

I couldn't find the blog with the links for this blog, so I search for some of my own. According to http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~schacht/rhe309k/tricia/advertisements.html the main Native American advertisements are the Indian Princess for Land O Lake Butter, Hi Yu apples and Abaco Tobacco showing Native Americans associated as housewives, selling fruits and smoking. In the United States, 12.4% of the population is over age 65 according to http://www.outdoorbillboard.com/articles/bps_outdoor_advertising18.html . Also a lot of the advertisements don't appeal to the elderly because of bad colors, lack of simplicity and the size of graphics and text.

I think that advertisers need to re-evaluate their customers and appeal to the rest of the non-white population. Also, they need to show these customers in the advertisements, not just as a quota, but to represent all of their customers.