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‘Myopic, Dopey, Ill-Informed Coverage’

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Were Analysts of Latino Voting Knowledgeable?

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In a Nov. 5 cartoon by the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste, President Jovenel Moïse remarks in Creole, “Darling, come get the champagne and put it back in the refrigerator. We will open it when the referendum is done.” Moïse enjoyed the support of the Trump administration during his own embattled presidency.

Were Analysts of Latino Voting Knowledgeable?

When attendees look back on the first Journal-isms Roundtable after Joe Biden’s historic victory ousting Donald Trump from the presidency, they will most remember Ray Suarez’s self-described “rant” about the media’s reporting on the way Latinos voted.


“The thing that drives me crazy is that if one of the anointed pundits went on CNN or MSNBC with exit polling in their hands and said, ‘you know, we’re trying to figure out why white voters voted so differently [you’d think he] was a screwball,” said Suarez (pictured), best known for his work on the “PBS NewsHour” and on NPR. “Why is he even asking this ridiculous question?

“So every four years, people scratch their heads in surprise that there are parts of Texas where Mexicans vote in a manner that’s more conservative than they vote in East L.A. . . . Yet if you go on CNN on their enormous risers with 13 commentators and not one Latino, and that person says, (intoning), ‘It’s interesting that Hispanic voters in South Texas are voting differently from those in Southern California,’ when Texans are different from Californians. A lot of Texans are different from a lot of Californians; it’s a more conservative state, that elects a more conservative legislature, that elects a more conservative government, year after year after cycle after cycle.  

“And the whole story that came out of this crazy election, that Biden somehow lost Latinos, when they made him competitive in Texas, when they pushed him over the line in Arizona, and they won in Nevada, and we’re saying, ‘Gee, those problems, that he lost Latinos’ — by winning them 2-to-1? The whole thing is just so bizarre, and it particularizes and foreignizes certain voters in a way that we would think is silly if people said it about white people.”  

The portrayal of Latino voting has continued as an issue even as the nation’s attention turned to Thanksgiving, the Biden transition and the alarming possibility of a further spike in COVID deaths.

Fifty-eight journalists gathered by Zoom on the Sunday afternoon of Nov. 15 to discuss “How Others Saw Our U.S. Election.”(Group photo by Rebecca Aguilar; photos above and below by Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks)

Former president Barack Obama, appearing on Charlamagne tha God’s radio show “The Breakfast Club” on Thanksgiving Eve, said, “People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump. But there are a lot of evangelical Hispanics who — the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans or puts detainees and undocumented workers in cages — they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on same-sex marriage or abortion.”

The same day, on “Democracy Now!” co-host Juan Gonzalez delivered his second analysis of Latino voting. “I’ll repeat it again, the key narrative of this election is not whether there was a small shift in the percentage of Latinx voters in some areas of the country turning toward Trump,” he said.

“The main story is that in an election which saw historic turnout, people of color — and especially Latinos — had an unprecedented increase in voting. And they, not white voters, represented the bulk of that increase. Virtually none of the reports have mentioned this, that for the first time in U.S. history Latinos’ turnout appears to have reached comparable levels to the rates for white and Black Americans.”

Fifty-eight journalists gathered by Zoom on the Sunday afternoon of Nov. 15 to discuss “How Others Saw Our U.S. Election.” More watched via Facebook Live or YouTube, , where the video can still be seen.

Speakers included Luis Alonso Lugo, who covers Washington for univision.com; Jacqueline Charles (pictured), Caribbean correspondent for The Miami Herald; Anita Li of Toronto, co-founder of Canadian Journalists of Colour and Macollvie J. Neel, managing editor of Haitian Times in New York.

In addition, Joseph Torres, Alicia Bell and Collette Watson of the media activist group Free Press elaborated on their 100-page essay, “Media 2070: An Invitation to Dream Up Media Reparations.”

Toasts and congratulations were extended to Arthur Cribbs of Howard University, the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2020 Student Journalist of the Year; Pam McAllister-Johnson, who in 1982 became the first Black female publisher of a mainstream paper, the Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal, who is to be inducted into the NABJ Hall of Fame; and Fred Sweets, contributing editor of the St. Louis American; former photographer and editor at The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Associated Press, also to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. The NABJ ceremony for all is Dec. 19.

The discussion was deep and nuanced, according to participants. “It is energizing to listen to such brilliant journalists,” said Collette Fournier, a New York photographer who watched later on You Tube. Leon Dash, a longtime journalist  and professor at the University of Illinois, wrote in the Zoom chat, “Really was a rich conversation with thoughtful, informed analysis.”

Alonso, a native of Venezuela, said, “We have had a tradition of populism in Latin America and we always like to look at the United States as a model.”

In October, Alonso had written for Univision.com a story headlined, “What do Donald Trump and Hugo Chavez have in common?“

“In order to win Florida, the Trump campaign planted this message that Biden is socialist. That wasn’t true, but that was very effective. Trump was able to garner a lot of support among the majority in Venezuela,” Alonso continued. “The U.S. election became a very heated topic among Venezuelans. And if you read what we call ‘Twitter-Zuela,’ you will be surprised at how many messages are strongly supporting the fraud alleged by President Trump.”

Among Haitians and Haitian Americans, said Neel of the Haitian Times (pictured), “All our family and friends were just glued to the TV. There were messages going back and forth . . . people were trading What’sApp messages . . . . Haitian radio and all these streaming services were reporting play by play.

“People were dancing in the streets for different reasons, financially, politically, emotionally. The toll that we felt under President Trump has just been really immense, right? That feeling of relief was out in the streets for all to see. . . .They’re looking forward to having an actual policy. There hasn’t really been a formal, consistent, stable way to govern Haiti, it’s just kind of been a very light copy of the Trump model, where President [Jovenel] Moïse just has his decrees, and that’s how he’s been ruling since the beginning of the year. . . .”

Although Trump had in 2018 labeled Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “s-hole countries,” and said that thousands of Haitians apparently bound for the United States “all have AIDS,” Moïse was a Trump supporter.

He aligned with Trump in taking a hostile stance toward leftist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and Trump supported him in turn.

Charles, who co-authored “Some Latin America leaders welcome Biden victory. For others it’s a moment of reckoning” in the Herald, told the Roundtable attendees, “The region is very fixated on this because . . . we really haven’t seen a foreign policy for the Western Hemisphere. . . .

“People are hopeful, not in terms of thinking that there’s going to be substantive change, but at least the attitude of the U.S. and ambassadors and embassies are now going to change because the directives are going to come from the State Department and not from individual ambassadors. . . .”

That’s echoed in Jamaica, Charles said: “They don’t expect there to be much change in policy under a Biden presidency, but they do expect there to be a change in tone.”  

Ordinary Haitians and Haitian Americans have a personal reason for their engagement: Immigration. “The hope is that Biden is going to introduce immigration reform prior to it getting to the Supreme Court,” Charles said.

She was referring to Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows immigrants from countries that have experienced natural disasters, civil strife or other “extraordinary” conditions to stay legally. It affects roughly 300,000 immigrants from Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan and El Salvador. Trump has sought to end it for the past three years.

Said Neel, “If you tell someone, if you don’t vote, your cousin or brother, husband, sister or what have you, might be sent back to Haiti, when TPS expires in March under Trump for them, that’s very different from a more vague, like ‘he’ll make our country better,’ or ‘immigrants will have more rights’, or something like that. . . .”

U.S. journalists can take some comfort that the racial reckoning since the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has emboldened the U.S. media to use more accurate racial terminology. That’s not always true in other countries.

Li (pictured) said, “There’s a lot of misconceptions about Canada, around how inclusive and multicultural we are, and it’s very much a flawed narrative, especially if you look at our treatment of First Nations, our indigenous or Native Americans, as you refer to them in the States. The coverage is — especially from our national broadcaster CBC — has gotten a lot of flak for anti-Black racism within the newsroom.

“Discussions of race are just not very common in Canadian media. . . . A lot of euphemisms like ‘racially charged’ instead of ‘racist,’. . . anything that kind of addresses incendiary language is just not going to be addressed at all.”

However, in some ways the U.S. is also behind the times, said Rochelle Riley, former Detroit Free Press columnist, commenting on the Suarez “rant.” “What we’re seeing is a sort of 10-year gap in how the mainstream media covers African Americans and how they cover Latinos. They’re now covering Latinos in this general way, the way they covered African Americans 10 or 20 years ago, and we’re allowing it, by allowing that same monolithic coverage, so I’m hoping that we all call that out when we see it.”

Riley added in the Zoom chat room, “I wish there had been more stories, broadcast and print, about the global view of how Trump separated children from their families. It seems almost a third-tier story most months, but hundreds of children are still in exile and he has done the ultimate magic trick — and made them disappear.”

Freelance journalist Rebecca Aguilar, president-elect of the Society of Professional Journalists, criticized coverage by both Fox News and CNN.

On CNN, “Van Jones says, ‘Let’s talk about the Latino vote,’ and how Biden’s people ignored them. They didn’t court them. Here’s an African American man who — I like Van Jones — but where’s the Latino analyst? Where’s the Latino journalist? I’m not saying we’re the only ones who can talk about it, but most of us know, have followed the voters, have followed many elections in the past, and again, that’s where the media goes wrong.

“So whether it’s Fox or CNN, they’re going to use this information to amplify whatever they want, and whatever agenda they have, and that’s the biggest mistake there is, and I think that when it concerns Latinos, this is another thing that we have to push. We have to push that we get more Latinos, other than just Ana Navarro, to be the analysts for the entire group.”

Ivan Roman, a former executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, said of Latinos, “You have generational differences, you’ve always had these differences by ethnicity within each group, so — basically, they use, we use Latinos a lot as a monolith, so we expect it to be a monolith. Basically, we’re trying to apply it to African American votes. . . . African Americans vote 85 percent or higher for the Democrats. So I guess they’re trying to equate it, equate the experience.”

Author and journalist Peter Eisner (pictured), speaking to his experiences over the years in Argentina, Brazil and other countries in the region, said, “People have no understanding of American racism. There’s an acceptance of the idea that racism is a component of what the United States is. . . . The other thing is that people don’t understand that African Americans and the coalition saved the bacon on the Biden victory. There’s no concept of that. It needs to be explained more.

“In the social media context, they’re receiving the same social media and misinformation that we receive here, like a vast number of people get garbage information, you know, socialism and stuff like that.”

Suarez was blunt. “I’ve seen so much myopic, dopey, ill-informed coverage of this vote in the last two weeks, more than in the last two years, frankly.”


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Richard Prince’s Journal-isms originates from Washington. It began in print before most of us knew what the internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a “column.” Any views expressed in the column are those of the person or organization quoted and not those of any other entity. Send tips, comments and concerns to Richard Prince at journal-isms-owner@yahoogroups.com

 

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