The Lost Continent

If you think that the press in the United States gives very little coverage to Latin America, you are not mistaken; a new study reveals that the percentage of news from the region in the principal North American media is pathetically low.

The study by the Journalism Project of Excellence, which examined more than 70,000 journalistic reports in 48 United States media during the last 12 months, shows that the coverage of international news that is not about Iraq, Iran and Pakistan in the majority of the US Media is miniscule; the rest of the world occupies less than six percent of the total.

According to this study, which included television, radio, newspapers, and Internet sites, the Palestine-Israel conflict occupied 0.5 percent of the total news space in the United States and United States-Russia relations 0.2 percent.

The percentage of news from Latin America was not measured separately but it is possible to estimate with certain security, that it occupied less than 0.5 percent.

The authors of the study pointed out to me, as an example, some dramatic news from Latin America that passed practically unperceived in the press of the United States.

– In the week from March 3 to 9, when Columbia attacked a guerilla company of the Farc in Ecuatorian territory, generating threats of war on the part of the Venzuealn President Hugo Chavez, the news occupied scarely 1 percent of the total coverage of United States news. On its part, the presidential campaign in the United States occupied 52 percent and the conflict between Israel and Palestine 4 percent.

– During the week of February 18 to 24, when the Cuban president Fidel Castro announced his resignation after almost 50 years in power and interminable confrontations with the United States, the news took up 6 percent of the total coverage of news. Comparatively the notice of the independence of Kosovo occupied 7 percent.

– During the week from December 2 to 7, the Venezuelan referendum in which Chavez suffered his first big electoral defeat occupied 2 percent of the news in the United States. Comparatively, Iran accounted for 7 percent of newspaper space.

– In the week from April 8 to 13 2007, the magnitude six earthquake that occurred in Mexico City and Acapulco accounted for 0.3 percent of the attention of United States media, much less than the 26 percent that was devoted to the presumably racist commentaries by the radio host Don Imus.

According to the study, many people are turning to the Internet to inform themselves about what is happening in the world. The international news not related to the United States represent 25 percent of the coverage online, compared with 13 percent in newspapers and 4 percent on the radio, says the study.

My opinion: I agree, but I would add that the people in charge of the majority of the media in the United states are also guilty of being too favorable to the agenda of the White House and too disconnected from the ethnic reality of its country.

Although perhaps they are right to consider Iraq, Iran and Pakistan as the principle international news, they forget that Latin America is the region of the world that most affects the daily life of the majority of people in the United States, whether it be on the subject of immigration, environment, commerce, or the importations of oil.

And even more importantly, the majority of the United States media (I must grant The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald the merit of being exceptions to the rule) have not even realized that there are 45 million Hispanics in the United States and millions of other United States residents that for family or commercial reasons are interested in the region.

The same fact that this study only analized English language media reflects the myopia of the majority of the United States media that forget that the networks of Spanish language television in cities like Miami or Lost Angles tend to have a greater audience than their competitors in English and that millions of Hispanics read news on newspaper websites of their native countries because they don’t find it here.

In other words, the United States is changing, but the people who control the information media are going to be the last to realize it.