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Comparing Local News in English and Spanish
It's the mid-point of the 6:30 p.m. broadcast, time for the day's financial update on the local news. Co-anchor Eduardo Quezada of LA's KMEX fades into the background as a scroll-down list fills the screen.
The Mexican peso is up, Brazil's real is down, and so is Venezuela's bolivar. From Los Angeles to Miami, one of the nightly features of Spanish-language news is not the Dow but Latin America's currency prices.
The 35.5 million Hispanic people in the United States are the fastest-growing segment of our population, yet local Spanish-- language television and the two networks that own most of the stations are largely invisible to the majority of Americans.
What is on Spanish-language TV news and how does it compare with and differ from the English-language variety?
To find answers, this year's local news study examined eight Spanish-language stations in the four largest Hispanic markets: Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Houston. Two weeks of programs were analyzed - one sweeps, one non-sweeps -- during the most popular time slot for news in each market.
In a multicultural media marketplace, Spanish-language local TV news is separate but essentially equal. It demonstrates similar news values and ranks with its English-language competitors in quality.
There are, however, differences, as traditions, resources, and demographic diversity both nurture and constrain news content.
Spanish-language local TV news is more populated by ordinary people, and filled with even more crime and victims, than English-language TV. It is more interested in homelands far away, if not the world in general. It believes immigration is a significant issue. And it is a more one-sided media world.
But it is also not monolithic. While stations differed only slightly by company -- Telemundo vs. Univision - they differed rather dramatically by city.
WHAT'S DIFFERENT, WHAT'S NOT
Let's start with basics.
When it came to overall scores for quality, we found no significant difference between Spanish-language stations and English-language stations.
If you calculated a GPA for the two genres, neither would make the dean's list. In the markets where both English-language and Spanish-language stations were evaluated, on average, they all earned "C's."
In their average-ness, the two media worlds were quite comparable. Both the Spanish and English...