Paul Bedard of The Washington Examiner reported “Latino groups Wednesday blamed a surge in hate crimes against Hispanics on harmful stereotypes portrayed on TV and in conservative media and are asking the administration to probe Fox News and talk radio, two media cited by the groups as the worst perpetrators.”
They want the FCC to make charts that monitor Hispanic stereotypes in the news. "We want the government to investigate this," said Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. "Unless we start this dialogue, these assaults will go on," he said, citing a surge in "hate crimes" against Hispanics.
Their mission statement reads: "NHMC envisions a world in which U.S. Latinos have media parity and are portrayed as multidimensional people devoid of negative stereotypes."
They’re clearly left-wing in orientation. They cite a survey from the polling firm Latino Decisions that found “Fox viewers accepted the most stereotypes of Hispanics, MSNBC the least.” They also compared Fox's Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's viewers and found that half of O'Reilly's watchers "think Latinos are on welfare and refuse to learn English."
The 80-page poll and analysis concluded that "conservative talk radio and Fox News audiences hold significantly more anti-immigrant and anti-Latino opinions."
Fox has a sister division, Fox Latino, which reports with a more immigrant-sympathetic tilt and was recently lauded by NPR. Francisco Cortes of Fox News Latino told Bedard, "The poll is yet another example of publicity hounds in action and they're clearly unaware of the existence of Fox News Latino."
The NHMC isn't very good at making fine distinctions. On their blog, executive vice president Inez Gonzalez recently implied that stereotypes in American media are somehow comparable to the mass murders encouraged by radio in Rwanda:
In the early 1990s, local media played a central role in the Rwanda genocide that aimed to get rid of the Tutsi, a minority ethnic group in the country. Between 500,000 to a million people were killed in Rwanda – a country of only seven million people....
Unfortunately, the U.S. media’s portrayal of people of color and immigrants as a threatening influence continues to wax and wane. The media needs an enemy, especially during a time of crisis, and the enemy of choice is often “the other.” Undocumented immigrants come to take our jobs, Muslims kill U.S. citizens, African-Americans lower our quality of life. We’ve heard them all.
