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Decision to shut down Bay Area Telemundo news operation cuts choices
By Michael Manekin
Article Last Updated:10/27/2006 12:53:27 PM PDT

Like many Bay Area Latinos, Mario Zamora is about to lose his primary means of learning about what's happening in his world.

Since the Spanish-language TV station KSTS (Channel 4, based in San Jose, announced last week that it will no longer offer local news shows, Zamora has been wondering where he'll turn for information.

Zamora doesn't read the newspaper much (he his English isn't quite up to snuff yet), so he relies on Telemundo to keep him posted on vital issues like immigration and local politics. Sure, he could get his news from KDTV (Channel 14) — the Univision-owned station, which will soon provide the Bay Area's only locally based Spanish-language newscast — but he thinks that the network offers too little information and too much entertainment.

"Telemundo directs themselves to the community," he says in Spanish from the door of Las Cazuelas, the San Mateo taqueria where he works. "It's as if they were chatting with us. They talk directly, without beating around the bush."

Now, Zamora said, he's upset with Telemundo's parent company, NBC.

"They're not thinking of the community," he said. "It can be argued they're doing it to disturb the Latino community."

The sentiment may be combative, but NBC's cost-cutting decision to regionalize Telemundo's news in six major metropolitan areas has a lot of folks riled up.

Latino and media activists across the county are raising their voices in protest. Here in the Bay Area, Latino organizations are lamenting the loss of one of the two sources for Spanish-language news programming.

"This is going to have a real strong impact on the Latino community in the Bay Area," said Ana Montes, of the Fresno-based Latino Issues Forum. "It's going to hinder a large population's access to news. And when you lessen the amount of news to the general public, they have less information to make decisions.

"Information is power," she added, "and with less information, they're not going to have access to knowing about important things that will affect their lives."

Much of the Bay Area Latino population of 1.4 million — about 21 percent of the population, according to the 2005 U.S. Census, although the number of undocumented Latinos makes the number much higher — rely on Univision and Telemundo as their primary sources of local news.

This is especially true, activists say, for recent immigrants who don't speak English. And now that Telemundo plans to regionalize their news, beginning in January, Latinos will have only one station to turn to for local news.

Zamora and other devotees of Telemundo will be left with a reduced report of their world, activists charge.

Sydney Levy, a Venezuelan-born media activist working for the Area-based media watchdog group Media Alliance, puts it like this:

"I mean, imagine that you were committed to watching news that's only in English and that news is coming from Australia," said Levy. "Politics are local to a great degree, and how would you get that level of getting to know your community — finding out what's happening in San Jose, in Emeryville, in San Francisco — when the reporters are in Dallas?"

Telemundo announced that a five-person team will replace the network's existing local news operations in the Bay Area, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Phoenix and San Antonio, with the reporters feeding their stories to shows based in Burbank and Dallas/Fort Worth.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists decried the cuts earlier this week in a press release, which challenged NBC's commitment to the Latino community in sharp, ironic language.

"If regionalized newscasts are good for journalism and not just a way to save money while giving the appearance of meeting the network's public-interest obligations, why are regional newscasts only being planned for the Spanish-speaking audience? Doesn't the English-language audience deserve this level of service?" the press release stated.

The cities where the local newscasts are being axed rank among the top 10 Hispanic markets, according to 2006-2007 Nielsen Media Research provided by the Hispanic journalist association — a fact which executive director Ivan Roman submits as evidence that media consolidation is detrimental to local news coverage.

When NBC bought Telemundo in 2001, the association stated in its press release that the network told the FCC that the merger would "result in an improvement in Telemundo's news-and-information programming, both at the network and local station level."

In essence, Roman said, the decision to cut local news is a betrayal of the network's promise to improve its quality and its commitment to serve the public.

"These are public airwaves, and they're given the license to function and to use the frequency of these airwaves by the FCC," said Roman. "To get this license, they're required to serve the public interest, and a keystone of the public interest is news. Now that they're reducing that drastically, they're not fulfilling that commitment."

All phone calls to the Telemundo affiliate in San Jose were not returned.

The fact that Latinos are not being served, Roman said, is a reflection that minorities do not own the media in the United States.

According to a 2006 study by FreePress, a media-studies nonprofit, minorities comprise 33 percent of the U.S. population, but own only 44 TV stations — 3.26 percent of all stations. Latinos own 15 stations — 1.11 percent of all stations. As a result, representation of Latinos and other minorities is left to a majority media, which often ignores the issues and concerns that concern minority communities.

An FCC hearing on media ownership will take place at 5 p.m. today at the Oakland Marriott City Center, Broadway at 10th Street.

According to a 2006 study by the Hispanic journalists group, Latinos make up 14.5 percent of the U.S. population, but fewer than 1 percent of the stories, an estimated 12,600 aired by the three major news networks, were exclusively about Latinos.

For Latinos, who have been smeared by the xenophobia and racism of the recent border control debates, the lack of media representation can prove a dangerous reality, according to Levy, of the Media Alliance.

"If you don't own it," Levy said, referring to the media, "then you are being talked about. And what we've found when you're being talked about, sometimes you're being treated OK, sometimes you're portrayed as a stereotype, and sometimes you're being ignored."

Levy is not a fan of either Telemundo or Univision — citing sensationalism and lack of engagement with social issues that matter more to the community — but he fears the arrival of a "canned" local news program from Telemundo, which would replace issues of local relevance with more chatarra (junk) that could easily translate to viewers in disparate communities.

"The problem with this issue of media concentration is that they're looking at news as if they're selling potatoes," Levy said. "But actually we're not selling potatoes, we're selling news and information that's basic to the foundation of democracy."