In a perfect world, the news stories we consume would all be fully accurate, truthful and excellent accounts of whatever event they are covering. We do not live in a perfect world. News stories are written by humans, and as humans we are all influenced by a massive variety of factors – including but not limited to the way we were raised, where we’re from, our political opinions, our religion, etcetera. With this in mind, can any reporter ever truly capture every angle of a story?
Through this lens, I examined the differences between two news sites’ coverage of the same story. Both the Los Angeles Times and El Diario Nueva York wrote about an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) complaint against Orange County this week – yet the articles are alarmingly different in the tone and story they convey to readers. The LA Times’ piece about the situation reads like a tragic tale of someone you’ll never meet. The article’s lead primes readers for what will undoubtedly be a story of heartbreaking injustice:
“Kelvin Hernandez Román was driving a friend’s car in Tustin in July when police stopped him because the tinted windows on the vehicle were too dark.”
The story tells of two men unrightfully detained by Immigration and Control Service of Customs (ICE) and why ACLU filed complaints about the treatment of the two men by both law enforcement and ICE. The account is accurate – but why is it so different from the article in El Diario about the very same story?
El Diario is not a “mainstream” news source like the LA Times. It is a New York based Spanish language daily paper, and seeing as it is written for a Spanish-speaking audience, the content tends to be different than what is published in papers like the LA Times.
El Diario covers the ACLU legal complaints similarly to the LA Times, at first. They give a rundown of the story, the names of the two men detained and other basic facts. The second half of the article, however, is an eight point list about knowing your rights in the case that you are wrongfully arrested and detained by ICE.
“The police and sheriffs cannot ask you about your immigration status,” the article says. “They cannot share your personal information, such as your address, with either ICE or with the border patrol, unless it is publicly available.”
The differences between these two articles center on the backgrounds of their respective authors and the audiences that each paper serve. The LA Times is written for English-speaking people, likely California natives. The audience that LA Times reporters are writing for likely isn’t worried about being detained by ICE, they are merely reading about it happening to others.
El Diario, however, is writing to people living in fear of ICE. Its Spanish-speaking readers very well could be targets of unwarranted ICE arrests simply because they might look or speak differently than ‘non-immigrant,’ mainly white Americans. It is a small difference, to include the rights one has upon arrest by immigration police, but it is definitely a notable one.
The failure to represent the Spanish-speaking American audience in mainstream media in this instance, I think, sheds light on an interesting point about our perception of news. Even when we might believe we are getting the complete story, there are likely other points and angles we would never even think to consider that exist beyond our own individual perceptions. The experiences of the American news audience are not universal – and I think we are doing ourselves a disservice in not listening to voices different than our own.
Sidney Richardson: Blog 