Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. will present a proclamation to The Bronx HIV CARE Network/Montefiore Medical Center as part of the commemoration of the National Latino AIDS Awareness Day 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
NILP--- Have you been following this?
CNN, You Can't Have It Both Ways:
It's Either Dobbs or Your Latino Future
By Roberto Lovato
Huffington Post (October 13, 2009)
On the eve of CNN's Latino in America series (LIA) -- its most important and expensive attempt to capture Latino audiences -- Latinos are of one mind about the two faces of CNN. I know this because I just spent the last two weeks traveling the country talking to Latino communities about Lou Dobbs and CNN. I got to meet some of the more than 50,000 people who, in just the last four weeks, have signed our petition at www.bastadobbs.com.
To see this vido, click here or on the image above
What I heard among the many voices that make up the Latino United States -- Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Mexicans and Salvadorans and many others in the Southwest -- was an unexpected unity and an intense concern about CNN's Latino hypocrisy: thinking that a few hours of serious reporting on Latinos by sunny Soledad O'Brien can make up for thousands of hours of anti-Latino extremism from the dark Lou Dobbs. This paradox has Latinos everywhere asking questions about CNN -- and so far we haven't gotten much in the way of answers.
One questioner was Latino media executive Jeff Valdez, who, during the Los Angeles LIA screening, pointedly asked Soledad O'Brien, "Will Latino in America include Lou Dobbs?" The answer: no. That's right, four hours about the Latino experience in the U.S., and not a word on the country's most notorious anti-immigrant, anti-Latino "news" anchor.
"What do you think Latinos should do about Lou Dobbs?" asked another member of the audience. Obrien's response -- that we should watch and support positive depictions of Latinos like those of LIA -- satisfied no one; neither do the rumors that Dobbs has started talking to Fox News about leaving CNN.
At the New York screening of LIA, an audience member asked about how CNN squares Latino in America with the hatred that shows up on Lou Dobbs show every night. Visibly irritated by having to defend CNN over Dobbs, a CNN executive answered, "I have nothing to do with Lou Dobbs. I don't confer with Lou Dobbs. He has not seen this program. My unit has no contact at all. So I don't answer that. I don't have an answer for it." This, in a nutshell, is the CNN position: when the question is about Lou Dobbs, they have no answer.
Such questions by and about Latinos form part of a larger dialogue that will be at the center of this week's immigration reform mobilizations as well as in CNN's LIA premiere next week. At a time when polls indicate Latinos experiencing increased levels of discrimination -- a time when hate crimes against Latinos are on the rise -- Lou Dobbs' war on immigrants and Latinos occupies a central place in the hearts and questions of Latinos. People are noticing CNN's attempt to have its Lou Dobbs cake and have Latinos eat it too.
Among the most creative and committed to bringing CNN's hypocrisy into the national dialogue about Latinos is 26-year-old Mexican immigrant Arturo Perez, an award-winning filmmaker, who just produced an inspired and inspiring video about CNN's Dobbs problem. The fantastic film was born during dinner table dialogues about Dobbs that then teenager Perez and his mother held over the course of many years. These dialogues are now taking place in thousands of bilingual households throughout the country.
"We would listen to Lou Dobbs and my mom and I would get very upset," Perez told me. "Ever since I was a teenager, I got so angry that I sent Dobbs and CNN many emails correcting his "facts" and warning them about the dangers of the kind of lies and hate he spread about Latinos. He never wrote me back. So, now I get to talk to him through my video." Latinos, it seems, are clearer than ever that, thanks to Lou Dobbs, watching CNN has become an exercise in disrespecting ourselves and denying our dignity.
Of all the questions I heard in my travels, one of them sums up the issue better than all the rest. "Does CNN really believe that they can have it both ways?" asked Guadalupe Vazquez, a Mexican immigrant living not far from CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. "They're trying to make money by reporting on us (Latinos) with this (Latino in America) show and with CNN en Espanol at the same time as they're making money off of hating us with Lou Dobbs!" exclaimed Vazquez, who I met through a community leader in Atlanta. As if speaking for the mass movement calling out Dobbs and CNN, Vazquez added, "I'll be damned if I allow them to get away with it."
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/cnn-you-cant-have-it-both_b_318475.html
It's Either Dobbs or Your Latino Future
By Roberto Lovato
Huffington Post (October 13, 2009)
On the eve of CNN's Latino in America series (LIA) -- its most important and expensive attempt to capture Latino audiences -- Latinos are of one mind about the two faces of CNN. I know this because I just spent the last two weeks traveling the country talking to Latino communities about Lou Dobbs and CNN. I got to meet some of the more than 50,000 people who, in just the last four weeks, have signed our petition at www.bastadobbs.com.
To see this vido, click here or on the image above
What I heard among the many voices that make up the Latino United States -- Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Mexicans and Salvadorans and many others in the Southwest -- was an unexpected unity and an intense concern about CNN's Latino hypocrisy: thinking that a few hours of serious reporting on Latinos by sunny Soledad O'Brien can make up for thousands of hours of anti-Latino extremism from the dark Lou Dobbs. This paradox has Latinos everywhere asking questions about CNN -- and so far we haven't gotten much in the way of answers.
One questioner was Latino media executive Jeff Valdez, who, during the Los Angeles LIA screening, pointedly asked Soledad O'Brien, "Will Latino in America include Lou Dobbs?" The answer: no. That's right, four hours about the Latino experience in the U.S., and not a word on the country's most notorious anti-immigrant, anti-Latino "news" anchor.
"What do you think Latinos should do about Lou Dobbs?" asked another member of the audience. Obrien's response -- that we should watch and support positive depictions of Latinos like those of LIA -- satisfied no one; neither do the rumors that Dobbs has started talking to Fox News about leaving CNN.
At the New York screening of LIA, an audience member asked about how CNN squares Latino in America with the hatred that shows up on Lou Dobbs show every night. Visibly irritated by having to defend CNN over Dobbs, a CNN executive answered, "I have nothing to do with Lou Dobbs. I don't confer with Lou Dobbs. He has not seen this program. My unit has no contact at all. So I don't answer that. I don't have an answer for it." This, in a nutshell, is the CNN position: when the question is about Lou Dobbs, they have no answer.
Such questions by and about Latinos form part of a larger dialogue that will be at the center of this week's immigration reform mobilizations as well as in CNN's LIA premiere next week. At a time when polls indicate Latinos experiencing increased levels of discrimination -- a time when hate crimes against Latinos are on the rise -- Lou Dobbs' war on immigrants and Latinos occupies a central place in the hearts and questions of Latinos. People are noticing CNN's attempt to have its Lou Dobbs cake and have Latinos eat it too.
Among the most creative and committed to bringing CNN's hypocrisy into the national dialogue about Latinos is 26-year-old Mexican immigrant Arturo Perez, an award-winning filmmaker, who just produced an inspired and inspiring video about CNN's Dobbs problem. The fantastic film was born during dinner table dialogues about Dobbs that then teenager Perez and his mother held over the course of many years. These dialogues are now taking place in thousands of bilingual households throughout the country.
"We would listen to Lou Dobbs and my mom and I would get very upset," Perez told me. "Ever since I was a teenager, I got so angry that I sent Dobbs and CNN many emails correcting his "facts" and warning them about the dangers of the kind of lies and hate he spread about Latinos. He never wrote me back. So, now I get to talk to him through my video." Latinos, it seems, are clearer than ever that, thanks to Lou Dobbs, watching CNN has become an exercise in disrespecting ourselves and denying our dignity.
Of all the questions I heard in my travels, one of them sums up the issue better than all the rest. "Does CNN really believe that they can have it both ways?" asked Guadalupe Vazquez, a Mexican immigrant living not far from CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. "They're trying to make money by reporting on us (Latinos) with this (Latino in America) show and with CNN en Espanol at the same time as they're making money off of hating us with Lou Dobbs!" exclaimed Vazquez, who I met through a community leader in Atlanta. As if speaking for the mass movement calling out Dobbs and CNN, Vazquez added, "I'll be damned if I allow them to get away with it."
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/cnn-you-cant-have-it-both_b_318475.html
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Latin Musica!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/latinmusicusa/index.html#/en
Don't forget to tune in this October on your local PBS station. Que Viva Los Latinos!
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
NAHJ Urges News Media to Stop Using the Term “Illegals” When Covering Immigration
The use of “illegals” as a noun and “illegal alien” distorts coverage, dehumanizes the subjects in this important public policy debate
Media Contact: Iván Román, Executive Director, NAHJ, (202) 662-7178, iroman@nahj.org
Washington, D.C. – As the heated debates over health care and immigration reform collide, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists calls on our nation’s news media to stop using the dehumanizing term “illegals” as a noun to refer to undocumented immigrants. NAHJ has long advocated for accurate terminology in news coverage of immigration. NAHJ is concerned with the increasing use of pejorative terms like “illegals” – which is shorthand for “illegal aliens”, another term NAHJ objects to using – to describe the estimated 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. Using “illegals” in this way is grammatically incorrect and crosses the line by dehumanizing and criminalizing the person, not the action they are purported to have committed. NAHJ calls on the media to never use “illegals” in headlines and in television news crawls. “We continue to see ‘illegals’ used as a noun seeping from the fringes into the mainstream media, and in turn, into the mainstream political dialogue,” said NAHJ Executive Director Iván Román. “Using these terms not only distorts the debate, but it takes away their identities as individuals and human beings. When journalists do that, it’s that much easier to treat them unfairly and not give them an equal voice in the controversy.” By incessantly using metaphors like “illegals”, the news media is not only appropriating the rhetoric used by people on a particular side of the issue, but also the implication of something criminal or worthy of suspicion. That helps to predetermine the credibility or respect given to one of the protagonists of this debate, which is not conducive to good journalism and does a disservice to the principles of fairness and neutrality. In addition, NAHJ has always denounced the use of the degrading terms “alien” and “illegal alien” to describe undocumented immigrants because it casts them as adverse, strange beings, inhuman outsiders who come to the U.S. with questionable motivations. “Aliens” is a bureaucratic term that should be avoided unless used in a quote. NAHJ also calls on editors and journalists to follow generally accepted guidelines regarding race and ethnicity and refrain from reporting a person’s legal status unless it is relevant to the story in question. The public in certain regions of the country have pressured news media to publish the legal status of any Latino who appears in the newspaper or on television, regardless of the story’s subject. Doing so contributes to the growing trend of profiling Latinos as non-Americans or foreigners and using them as scapegoats for a variety of society’s ills, a tone that has become more pervasive in the public dialogue over the past few years. Few now doubt that this helps create a fertile environment for hate speech which we have seen can lead to discrimination and a growing number of hate crimes in the U.S. against Latinos. As the U.S. tackles immigration reform in the future, NAHJ believes that responsible, fair, and non-simplistic coverage of this complex issue is in order. The words used can be part of the problem or can contribute to fair coverage and a fruitful public debate. NAHJ, a 1,500-member organization of reporters, editors and other journalists, addresses the use of these words and phrases by the news media in its Resource Guide for Journalists. For excerpts of some of the relevant entries in the resource guide, click here, http://www.nahj.org/nahjnews/articles/2009/september/immigrationentries.shtml. For a copy of NAHJ’s resource guide, visit http://www.nahj.org/resources/research.shtml.
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