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8. Prime-Time Protest Latinos and Network Television Chon A. Noriega Introduction Despite the well-documented growth of the Latino community as a political and market force within California and nationally, Latinos entered the twenty-first century with a lower level of media access and representation than when protests first raised the issue in the 1960s. After all, since 1970, Latinos have grown by roughly two and a half times relative to the national population, but they still receive the same small percentage of the jobs and on-screen representation (Noriega, 2002, 2003). In effect, employment opportunity for the Latino community has decreased in the entertainment industry to nearly one-third the level of the 1970s. Given that Latinos constitute the plurality of Los Angeles (47 percent), their virtual absence within Hollywood is all the more shocking. This essay will focus on a single case study—that of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, established in 1986—which exemplifies the range of media reform activities over the past two decades, but especially since the Telecommunications Act of 1996.1 While the act focused on the deregulation of competing business interests across media platforms (television, cable, Internet, phone), it also ended or eroded those regulatory policies focused on the social consequences of telecommunications that had emerged out of the civil rights era.2 Following the case study, I will consider the current issues facing media reform and the most viable strategies. Before turning to the National Hispanic Media Coalition, however, I would like to consider two examples of a shift in “image” advocacy for Latinos over the past decade, because it informs the context for media reform since the 156 chon a. noriega 1996 act. This shift is one from the articulation of a social agenda within a commercial context to the naming of an ethnic market through cultural nationalist rhetoric. The first incident involves a little-noted change in strategy for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and the second a recent controversy around a popular Spanish-language Los Angeles television station. In February 1998, MALDEF began running a television ad in southern California just prior to the statewide vote on Proposition 227 (eliminating bilingual education). What was unusual about this ad is that it did not address the proposition or even the underlying issues about educational access, language use, and immigration. Instead, the ad focused on improving the Latino image, specifically addressing the 54 percent of whites who held negative views of Latinos as a group unconcerned with the quality of American life. Though primarily known for its precedent-setting cases related to voting rights and educational access, MALDEF had also played a crucial role in the media reform efforts of the 1970s. Now, facing an initiative that pitted white voters against Latino students, MALDEF turned from earlier legal and regulatory strategies and produced “the first-ever image ad for an ethnic group” (Gellene, 1998:D4). Even more telling, the image ad ran during the evening news. The premise for this ad was that the evening news—and the press more generally—had played a role in shaping the negative views that white voters held about Latinos.3 Thus, the ad was designed to counteract the biases of the mass media in an effort to reframe active political debates focused on immigration and affirmative action. But if the ad attempted to counteract the biases of the evening news, it also associated itself with journalistic notions of objectivity, acting as a supplement to the very same evening news it implicitly critiqued. Ironically, the press covered the image ad as an “advertising and marketing” story in the business section, which, in many ways, was all too true. The fact that access to the public sphere—as well as to the press that claimed to provide objective and balanced news based on both sides of the story—now had to be purchased raised no eyebrows.4 In spring of 2005, a local Spanish-language newscast leased billboard space from Clear Channel Communications for seventy-five posters around Los Angeles that heralded its newscast in the following terms: “Los Angeles, CA Mexico/Tu Ciudad. Tu Equipo.” For the station, KCRA-TV Channel 62, the billboards merely addressed a local audience: “All we are saying is, ‘It’s your city, your town, your team.’ We are a team that’s educating and informing the Spanish-language marketplace” (Gorman and Enriquez, 2005:B3). The ad quickly became the target of the political action...

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