Covering a New America: How Multicultural Communities are Shaping the Future of Journalism

Editor Martin Baron spoke to AEJMC conventioneers on Aug. 7, just a week after taking the helm of The Boston Globe. At the Pew Center luncheon, the former Miami Herald editor urged educators to prepare future journalists to cover such stories as Elian Gonzalez for which The Herald won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Some highlights:

A few weeks back, as some of you may recall, Fidel Castro was giving a typically interminable speech. Somewhere in the middle of it, he suddenly stopped, he faltered and he began to buckle. Aides came to his side. They grabbed him and they gently guided him down to the platform. What happened is Castro had fainted.

Within minutes, Fidel was back on his feet. He looked pretty sickly but he was lucid enough to tell the crowd that he hadn’t slept much the night before, that the heat had gotten the better of him, and they could rest assured he’d be back later in the day to keep going with that speech. Sure enough, at six o’clock that evening he was back and he was going on and on and on.

Now in most of the country, certainly in the media capitals of New York and Los Angeles and Washington, Castro’s fainting spell was not big news. In fact, in The New York Times that I received at home there was not even a word about it.

But at The Miami Herald and other South Florida newspapers and at local television stations there, Castro’s near-collapse was momentous news. The Herald actually gave it a banner headline, two stories on the front page, a sequence of pictures showing Castro’s collapse and getting up again and two full pages of comprehensive coverage inside. Everything that you wanted to know about Castro’s fainting spell. Spanish-language television in Miami covered the incident nonstop. Telemundo carried a line at the bottom of the screen asking: El principio del fin (the beginning of the end)?

When 57 percent of the population of Miami-Dade County is Hispanic, about half of them of Cuban heritage, the definition of “news” may be far different than what you think it is and what it may be in the rest of the country.

The fact is that people wanted to know: Was Castro so ill that we were now witness to his final days? Who would succeed him? How had the American government prepared for this? What did we really know about Castro’s physical and mental health?

Now the precise numbers escape me at this point, but I think The Herald’s sales the next day went up something like 3 percent and those of El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister publication, rose in the double digits.

This may lead to the usual question about Miami, which is: Is everybody down there nuts? The fact is that Castro suffers heat stroke, recovers quickly and this is big news. If you already thought that Miami was a country apart, this may confirm it.

Immigration Impacts News

But Miami is very much a part of the United States, and the disparate treatment of the Castro story shows a lot about how news agendas are taking shape across the country, especially in major metropolitan areas that are feeling the effects of an enormous wave of immigration.

As many of you know, Miami-Dade County has the largest concentration of Hispanics anywhere in the country. You can hear Spanish as much as English. You’ll hear talk about foreign policy as much as domestic politics. What happens in Miami, what happens in Cuba, what happens in Venezuela or what happens in Colombia is really local news. It’s not considered to be foreign news; it’s considered to be local news.

The question is: Is Miami a peculiar case? I don’t actually think it is and increasingly it won’t be.

The population of Boston is now over half minority, largely because of an influx of Latinos from the Dominican Republic, from Central America, from Puerto Rico, as well as an influx of Asians. In the Boston area, in Lowell, an estimated 30,000 Cambodians live. That’s about a third of the city’s population. It’s the second largest Cambodian population [in America] outside of Long Beach, CA.

California is now a state where minorities are in the majority with an increasingly influential Latino electorate. Orange County, where I was once in charge of the edition, has the country’s largest Vietnamese population. In that county, a longtime Republican stronghold, Latinos had reached 40 percent of the population when I left my job there in 1996.

What happens in Mexico, what happens in Nicaragua, what happens in El Salvador, what happens in Vietnam, what happens in China, what happens in Japan is as important to many in California as anything that actually happens in Washington.

That gets at the point I want to make here: The immigration wave that is changing the face of America is certain to influence our profession. And it poses a challenge we are not yet prepared to meet, and one for which those who prepare journalists of the future – like most of you – are going to have to take some responsibility.

In my view, it is more important than worrying about the convergence of various media, like print, television and Internet, which is very much a subject in vogue, or at least was before the technology bubble burst. Convergence, in my view, may be worth a course or two. But I think the profound demographic changes in America strike at key issues for all of us, whether we’re currently journalists or preparing to become them or teaching those who intend to become journalists.

New Issues Surface

How well do we understand our new communities? Is the agenda of the immigrant communities substantially different than the journalistic agenda that we have come to accept?

Do their agendas include issues that are simply off the radar for the nation-
al media in the United States? Micro issues on a national scale, but all-consuming issues on the local level like the Castro issue? And if so, how do we deal with that?

Why is it also that most staffers at newspapers know so little about other cultures? And what are we doing to fix that? How well can we communicate with the people that we’re covering? Why is it that so few people on our staffs speak other languages? And what are we doing to fix that?

How, particularly in major metropolitan areas that are most affected by the waves of immigration, can we convert newcomers to the United States and their children into readers of our newspapers? … Should the coverage of today be shifted to recognize that their interests and needs may be quite different?

Are we too Eurocentric in our foreign coverage and in our coverage of international policy-making? Should we be putting more emphasis on immigration coverage and less on political warfare? Shouldn’t this cause us to reassess the long-running decline in foreign coverage at most newspapers and broadcast networks, as well?

Castro’s fainting incident suggests that there are, indeed, some subjects that will be of overwhelming consuming interest to a segment of our readers but that won’t register at all with the national media. If we fail to give these subjects adequate attention, we risk irrelevance. If we lack the tools to cover these subjects appropriately, I think we demonstrate incompetence.

The Castro incident was a test in several very basic ways for The Miami Herald. It tested the paper’s story judgment. What kind of coverage was appropriate when it turned out that the old man was really just fine? Why a banner headline for something that seemingly turned out to be nothing? Would you call that pandering or would you call it serving readers? Were we equipped to cover the story adequately, to monitor local Spanish-language radio and television, to speak to people in Cuba who know no English, to monitor Granma, the Cuban news outlet? Were we knowledgeable enough about Cuba and Cuba’s government hierarchy to assess instantly how he might be succeeded?

For The Miami Herald, coverage of Castro’s near-collapse was, in fact, a no-brainer … We were well-prepared to deal with that story. [We had] a foreign editor who speaks Spanish fluently and has covered Latin America extensively. A correspondent responsible for Cuba who has been to the country perhaps a dozen times. A staff that was prepared to tap into diplomatic circles and that knew enough about its community that it could fully reflect the reaction and the mood of the Cuban population.

But newspapers are tested in other ways and sometimes found to be not up to the task or, in fact, too late to it. There is one [instance] where I think The Herald was late as well and where many other media never actually caught on.

Explain Cultural Beliefs

In the Elian case, for example, the boy’s miraculous rescue at sea by men who were fishing at the time – not necessarily fishermen – acquired a religious mythology that some may have found laughable but that was, in fact, very real and very true to many Cuban-Americans.

The religious symbolism surrounding Elian began with the tale, never actually confirmed, that dolphins had circled him and kept him safe. This led to comparisons with the tale of the drowning fisherman saved by La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba.

Others saw him as a Moses put upon the waters by his mother and rescued so that some day he could return to Cuba to save his people. Some compared him to a baby Jesus, arriving just before Christmas. And in the year 2000, no less. He had become a symbol of hope among many Cubans.

Regardless of your personal view, the religious overtones of the Elian saga needed to be explained to a broader audience. But first we needed to know that those religious overtones existed. And frankly, we at The Herald came late to that story.

It is too easy, and I think very wrong, to simply dismiss such beliefs as superstition or, probably many would say, lunacy that’s not worth telling. If you wanted to understand fully the Elian story, if you wanted to understand why some Cuban-Americans reacted the way they did, you could not just laugh this off. You had to understand their history. You had to understand their personal experience, their culture, their religion. You had to actually speak to people in their own language. You had to listen. You had to really listen.

Many news outlets never told of these cultural and religious themes running through Miami’s Cuban community – just as many news outlets never really understood Miami’s Cubans at all. Cuban-Americans, I think, became the object of caricature and ridicule.

One major news organization repeatedly ran stories suggesting that there was widespread dissent within the Cuban community on the subject of Elian, and that those who favored the boy’s return to Cuba wouldn’t speak out for fear of retaliation.

Now, it is true that there were some dissenters within the Cuban community in Miami. And it’s true that many of those people probably feared that they might be criticized or maybe even harassed. But the truth was that, within the Cuban community, very, very, very few people favored his return. Reliable surveys showed that nine out of 10 wanted him kept in the United States and, in public opinion polling, that’s about as close as you get to unanimous.

Many news organizations did not understand the Cuban community because they weren’t equipped to understand it. They didn’t speak the language. They were grossly out of touch with one of America’s major immigrant groups.

Cuban-Americans would say they were not very well served by the national media. More important, in my view, is that readers and viewers of the national media weren’t well served. Because they were denied the opportunity to understand why Cuban-Americans felt as they did, why Miami’s Cubans seemed to be out of step with the rest of American public opinion. They didn’t have to agree, but they certainly should have understood.

What does all of this have to do with you? How should this influence journalism education?

Push Students Out of the Classroom

I think what you need to do is … help our profession become less insular. We spend too much time in the office and too little in the field. Our social lives tend to revolve around each other rather than around people in other lines of work. Reporters in Washington, I think, would be well served by leaving the District [of Columbia] more often and spending some quality time in the rest of the country.

I think we could do with fewer television shows where journalists interview other journalists.

Those who teach journalism can help. One way you can help is by teaching less pure journalism and letting students learn more about something else. Learn a language, learn more about government, study Chinese history or mathematics or science or art. If you’re trying to pack students’ course work with more pure journalism classes, I think you’re making a mistake. You need to make your programs more interdisciplinary.

Set up collaborative programs with other departments. Why not special language seminars geared toward the vocabulary necessary for everyday street-level journalism? Encourage students to spend a semester or a year overseas. And not just in Europe, but in Latin America or Asia, where the new Americans are actually coming from. In fact, why not go beyond encouraging them and actually make it a requirement?

Mostly, I believe you need to structure journalism programs that push your students out of the classroom so that they are exposed to people who are wholly different, who speak another language, who come from different countries, who hold different beliefs, who see the world through a very, very different lens.
Too much of journalism education today, it seems to me, revolves around the machines that we’re actually using when it should be focusing on how we can best pursue our mission. Too much time on convergence, too much time in the classroom, too little time in the community.

Why can’t a class be dispatched to live for a week among the Latinos of East Los Angeles or among the Vietnamese of Boston or the Greeks of Astoria, Queens? Design a project, research it in advance, send students out of the classroom and into the field and out of their zone of comfort.