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diggKind of like wearing an ‘invisibility cloak’
American media is pretty fickle. Used to be Latinos had to be gang members or disaster victims to draw the attention of U.S. news magazines.
Now they have to be immigrants. And middle class, citizen Latinos – who are the majority of the U.S. Hispanic population – are almost invisible in mainstream news publications.
That’s the conclusion of a recent Arizona State University study commissioned by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
The project reports that out of 1,547 magazine stories published in Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, only 18 stories, or 1.2 percent, were about Latinos.
The majority of stories predominantly about Latinos (12 out of 18) focused on immigration. Only five stories of the 1,547 total (0.3 percent) significantly included Latinos in non-Latino stories.
"Overall, the news magazine coverage of Latinos in 2005 was predominantly about Latino immigration and presented migrants as a problem for U.S. politics, culture, and society. Such representations make it difficult for society to see the broader array of Latino roles and contributions to American communities," the report stated.
