Hispanics

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Your weekend think piece: A different take on America's shortage of minority journalists

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For several decades, one of the primary goals of those who run American newsrooms has been (and justifiably so, from my point of view) increasing the number of mainstream journalists who are African-American, Latino, Asian, Native Americans and part of other minority groups, defined by race.

At the same time, there have been less publicized debates -- mostly behind the scenes -- about the need to bring more intellectual and cultural diversity into our newsrooms. As one journalist friend of mine once put it, what's the use of bringing in more African-Americans, Latinos, etc., if they all basically went to the same schools as everyone else and have the same set of beliefs between their ears?

You can see these two issues collide in William McGowan's the much-debated 2003 book, "Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism." He argues that years of diversity training in American newsrooms has actually made them more elitist and narrow, purging many professionals who come from blue-collar and non-urban backgrounds.

Before you write that theory off as conservative whining, what was that statement near the end of the famous New York Times self-study entitled "Preserving Our Readers' Trust (.pdf)"?

Our paper’s commitment to a diversity of gender, race and ethnicity is nonnegotiable. We should pursue the same diversity in other dimensions of life, and for the same reason -- to ensure that a broad range of viewpoints is at the table when we decide what to write about and how to present it.
The executive editor should assign this goal to everyone who has a hand in recruiting.
We should take pains to create a climate in which staff members feel free to propose or criticize coverage from vantage points that lie outside the perceived newsroom consensus (liberal/conservative, religious/secular, urban/suburban/rural, elitist/white collar/blue collar). 

And also: 


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Concerning Hispanic evangelicals and the death penalty: Dig a little deeper, please

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In my days covering the state prison system for The Oklahoman, I witnessed a handful of executions — some high profile and others not.

Given that experience, headlines concerning public support for — and opposition to — capital punishment always catch my attention.

A front-page story by the Houston Chronicle this week tackled a compelling angle: Hispanic evangelicals forming what the newspaper described as a "new front in the battle against the death penalty."

The Chronicle's lede:

For years, Samuel Rodriguez, a California Assemblies of God preacher, accepted both views as gospel truth.

But then came nagging doubts about capital punishment's effectiveness in deterring crime and a growing belief that "African-Americans and Hispanics disproportionately are on the wrong end of the injection." After a decade of soul-searching, Rodriguez reached a startling conclusion: To truly be pro-life means to support life "inside and outside the womb."

Today, Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the nation's largest Hispanic evangelical group, has become emblematic of a new wave of conservative Christians rallying opposition to the death penalty. Rodriguez fought to spare
the life of schizophrenic Texas double-killer Scott Panetti — a federal court stayed the execution — and, in a Time magazine essay, decried a botched Oklahoma execution.

In March, a second Hispanic group, the New York-based National Latino Evangelical Coalition, became the first evangelical association to call for capital punishment's end.

"The idea that the evangelical church gives rubber-stamp approval to the death penalty is no longer applicable," Rodriguez said. "More and more, Bible-believing individuals, theological conservatives, Christ's followers in America, are beginning to sway away from capital punishment."

Keep reading, and the Houston newspaper makes the case that Hispanic evangelicals "are entering a contentious debate that for decades has split American believers":


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Big setup, big letdown: New York Times on Luis Palau event

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The New York Times did a promising advance for Luis Palau's CityFest, then let the follow-up slide. The newspaper used the occasion for an indepth on the growth of evangelical Christianity in New York, highlighting the role of immigrants. But the event coverage was pedestrian, paint-by-the-numbers, almost as if the Times had lost interest by then.

The 1,500-word advance has some strong virtues. It tells of the patient but exuberant preparations for the July 10 event. It provides a peek into the festive, exuberant Sunday worship of some of the churches. It tells how they serve immigrants on several levels: spiritual, social and cultural. And it quotes a variety of evangelicals: Haitian, Ecuadoran, Salvadoran, Trinidadian.

"The size of the festival belies the city’s secular reputation and speaks to the vibrant evangelical movement in New York," the Times says. At times it sounds almost affectionate for the main speaker, without injecting stereotypes about the religious right:

 

Nearly 900 of the 1,700 churches participating in the festival are Hispanic, organizers said. Latino leaders were the ones two years ago to invite Mr. Palau, an endearing, white-haired bilingual immigrant from Argentina who has built a reputation as the Hispanic Billy Graham, but African-American and Korean-American church leaders quickly got involved in the planning.
The six-hour event is expected to highlight the multidenominational and multiethnic flavor of evangelical Christianity in New York and its suburbs, drawing hundreds of churches whose members also hail from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
"What the Palau Festival has been able to do is catalyze a growing movement of Christian voices present in the city," said Gabriel Salguero, a pastor of a multiethnic church in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. It represents, he added, a "coming-of-age of immigrant evangelicals" in New York.

While numbers aren't easy to come by, the newspaper does a decent job. It also gives some "whys" for the rise of evangelicalism:


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