Ethnic Media Content Analysis

The national Spanish-language newscasts looked different from each other and from their English-language counterparts. Telemundo opened its May 11 newscast with three different crime stories from across the country — murders in California, Illinois and Texas — before turning to a relatively short piece on the plane scare in Washington.

Univision, meanwhile, opened with a lengthy package on the plane scare. It quoted a range of people — the Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Hispanic Congressional employee, and President Oscar Berger of Guatemala, who had been in the Capitol for trade talks.

The pieces on the two networks were different in tone as well. The Univision story at several points drew comparisons to September 11, 2001, and relayed complaints from evacuees that it was difficult to clear the Capitol. The Telemundo piece emphasized that the Capitol was empty in “seconds.” The report quoted the president of El Salvador, who was visiting the Capitol, as saying the evacuation “was very effective, and that only a few cell phones were lost. And someone ripped their pants.”

Immigration matters and the accounts of struggling immigrants also played a big role in the national Spanish-language newscasts. On May 11, Univision’s “Noticiero” did an update of a story on thousands of New York residents who were going to lose their drivers’ licenses because they did not have valid Social Security cards. “Today, on the other hand, thanks to a judicial decision, there is hope,” anchorman Jorge Ramos told his audience. “Although, as Blana Rosa Vilchez of New York says, we should not get overconfident.”

The use of the word “we” is interesting because of the way it links the identity of the station with its audience. “On your side” isn’t just a marketing phrase for these newscasts. There is a definite feeling that the news is aimed at a particular community, and that the station is working with its viewers.

On May 11, Telemundo’s “Noticiero” did a piece focusing on Springdale , N.Y. , where the rape and murder of a housewife, apparently by a Guatemalan worker, had created distrust toward immigrant workers. The story featured some of the same “we’re in this together” viewpoint. “The workers simply state that they are paying for the actions of one person,” said the reporter. “This is taking away their daily bread as workers: because of one, everyone has to pay.”

And both networks were interested in news south of the border. Both had a story about Mexican soap opera actors hit by a car in Mexico City . Telemundo had several other pieces from Mexico, including a story about how the U.S. embassy denied a humanitarian visa to a woman whose husband had been beaten in New Jersey, violence in the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, and the death of an actress in Mexico City who had a heart attack when she thought she was being robbed.

Looking at the geographic focus of the stories covered — what the stories were about rather than where they were reported from — Spanish-language TV really stood out. On May 11 Univision’s national newscast included stories about the arrest of 400 youths by the government of Cuba, the man who ran over Mexican actors on a street in Mexico City, and the increase in fake versions of drugs like Viagra coming over the Mexican border into the U.S. Even the story of the Washington plane scare took a different approach with its interviews with Hispanic witnesses.

The numbers make the differences between the Spanish-language outlets and their English-language counterparts clear. Roughly 36% of the stories on all the Spanish-language TV newscasts we examined were about international topics.³ That is far above local TV’s 9% and cable’s 29%, though less than the national evening TV news with 48%.⁴

Perhaps because of Telemundo’s heavy focus on murders, crime coverage in the national Spanish-language newscasts was high, 28%, well above the 19% on the network newscasts.⁵

As for the specific topic of foreign relations, Spanish-language newscasts stuck out for the large amount they had at national level, just as they did at the local level. The national newscasts devoted about 19% of their stories to such news, almost twice the 10% the mainstream network evening newscasts carried. The national Spanish-language newscasts looked a bit more like their English-language counterparts in the amount of their government coverage — 16% for Spanish-language, 17% for English-language.⁶