CARBONDALE - It was a massive mistake that stared scholar and Latino political analyst Federico Subervi in the face as he analyzed and assimilated major American media coverage of the Latino population during his research beginning in the early 1980s.

Listen to audio of Subervi describing forms of media used to inform Latinos of political coverage.

"The Latino vote is not monolithic," Subervi said.

And it's disastrous today for political leaders and those aspiring for office such as the current presidential candidates to even consider that notion.

Speaking about Al Gore's loss in 2000 to George W. Bush, Subervi showed with numbers that if Gore had aggressively pursued the more liberal vote in central Florida coming from the mainly Puerto Rican communities around Orlando, he would have won the state, even though there is a strong conservative Republican bloc of Cuban voters in the Miami area.

"Gore gave up about two to three weeks before the election," Subervi said.

Subervi, a renowned Texas State University journalism professor, is director of Latinos and Media Project (www.latinosandmedia.org), an informational Web site pertaining to Latinos and the media.

He was the guest speaker at a Wednesday luncheon in the Southern Illinois University Carbondale Student Center that was hosted by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute and Southern Illinois University Carbondale's Global Media Research Center.

He spoke about his recent book, "The Mass Media and Latino Politics," published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and released last summer.

In his research for the book, Subervi said he broke the Latin American population into the unique, diverse ethnicities that it's composed of in the United States.

"I made a differential by separating the Puerto Ricans, the Cubans and Mexican-Americans. I hope this work will contribute to political science," Subervi told the audience.

He began his research with some basic questions such as how do the major media cover Latino issues and how do the Hispanic media cover those same issues.

During his detailed analysis of stories in major media outlets such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Miami Herald, along with some of the major networks, Subervi stumbled into something that was dumbfounding to him.

"Even on the issue of education, that is considered of importance to the Latino populations, there was hardly any substance to it (coverage). The most applicable thread was 'the Latino vote.' Coverage comes when political candidates go to the barrio," Subervi said.

In other words, Latin Americans were being covered as a homogeneous population that could be blanketed with a single representative story or editorial.

During a question-answer period following his talk, Subervi said in his 10 years of network news analysis, less than 1 percent of the major stories are about the Latino population.

And of the stories that do air about the Latino population, one-third center on problems with immigration, one-third on Latino crime stories and the remaining third show what benefits and positive attributes Latinos contribute to culture and life's mainstream, Subervi said.

scott.fitzgerald@thesouthern.com

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