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 .