Interviews with dozens of Latino journalists across the U.S. yield stories of stubborn disrespect and discrimination in today’s newsrooms

Editor’s Note: If you are a Latino journalist, you’re likely not happy that your pay is as much as 45 percent lower than your white peers, or that you likely have suffered disparaging comments about your accent or your appearance, or learned about unspoken employment “expiration dates” for women, or you have become frustrated at the lack of resources and opportunity for professional growth.

2020 was a year of reckoning. It was also a year in which Latinos in newsrooms across the country stood up and spoke out about inequality and disrespect.

An ongoing study of Latinos in newsrooms across the United States, conducted in the summer and fall of 2020 by the nonprofit Fundamedios group, has identified a wave of discontent.

The study’s initial findings, portrayed here, help define a landscape we illustrated in A Tale of Two Newsrooms, in the very first issue of palabra.

This important Fundamedios research is supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Donald Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Read here about threats and intimidation of journalists covering immigration and the border, after the shooting deaths of 23 people in El Paso, in 2019.

Read here about assaults on journalists covering protests in 2020 sparked by deaths at the hands of police.

When she was 7 years old, Esmeralda Bermudez already knew she would one day work at the Los Angeles Times.

“I never dreamed of having a husband, I dreamed of working at the L.A. Times,” Bermudez said.

Today she’s one of the Times’ principal reporters covering the Latino community and immigration. But there’s more to Bermudez’s emerging role in the newsroom: She’s one of the leading figures in the newspaper’s new Latino Caucus.

This summer, the Los Angeles Times Guild announced the caucus’s arrival in an open letter written by many of the Times’ Latino journalists. The #SomosLAT movement started with a bold challenge to the newspaper’s owners and managers: The group denounced the paper’s history of disparaging coverage of the region’s significant Latino community -- it makes up almost half of the city’s population -- often tainted with characterizations like “criminals,” “illegal aliens” and “border jumpers.”

The printed disrespect of Latinos, over most of the 139 years of the paper’s existence, was heartbreakingly described in a column by Gustavo Arellano, who quoted professor Mark Cronlund Anderson calling the Times “unrepentantly racist” for describing Latinos as “greasers” who were “lazy, thriftless, ignorant, superstitious and unstable.”

In this summer of reckoning with the country’s long-standing racial inequality -- introspection prompted by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police -- the Times’ Latino journalists followed the example of the paper’s Black Caucus and a number of Latino journalists who, over decades, had raised their own voices.

But rather than take cover or issue reprisals, the Times made history by committing to change.

Bermudez said this reckoning came “at a time of great reflection at a national level about where we are in race relations and social injustices that happened for generations in this country. It is a necessary conversation about the Black and Latino perspectives and their situations, the misrepresentation and distortion of the stories, and the gap that exists on how we represent the community we cover.”

The Times’ summer of discontent punctuates a study begun this year by Fundamedios, a Pan-American nonprofit that advocates for media freedom and the protection of journalists.

Here’s one of the important findings, so far, from the survey: Latino journalists do not like answering surveys about discrimination, especially if their participation may somehow jeopardize job security.

Nonetheless, Fundamedios collected data from 112 journalists who participated in in-depth interviews. In this cohort, there were more women than men who shared their newsroom experiences.

Another important finding: Almost half -- 45% -- of the participants said they experienced direct racial discrimination.

That was most often reported as differences in salary for equal work, or in unbalanced contractual conditions.

And then there were complaints of a lack of appropriate resources for Latino journalists to do their work, especially in broadcast journalism, where survey participants cited receiving inadequate equipment or being relegated to understaffed reporting teams.

Typically, investigative journalists work in teams for each part of a project. But unlike white peers, Latino journalists in our survey said they were too often left to investigate, record and edit their own reports. Moreover, many said their story ideas were routinely rejected. Others reported disparaging comments about their physical appearance or accents. And a significant number of Latino journalists said they believe they’ve not been given equal opportunity for advancement.

For news industry analysts, the general findings underscore the plight of journalists of color in today’s media markets: In 2018, the Pew Center for Research said 76% of the nation’s newsrooms were non-Hispanic white and 61% male. And before that, the American Society of News Editors found that between 2004 and 2019, 37% of newsrooms became more diverse, adding Black, Latino, Asian and female journalists. In the same period, 30% of newsrooms became less diverse.

The sting of inequality

*Results in 2020 from an ongoing Fundamedios study of Latino journalists*

A life of building bridges

For Esmeralda Bermudez, the role as a bridge between two worlds is not new.

As a child, she translated for her parents. This was an early lesson in the power of information, and it inspired her to pursue journalism.

*Esmeralda Bermudez, Los Angeles Times staff writer, talks about storytelling with young readers.*

Bermudez was barely a month old when a long civil war exploded in her native El Salvador. She was three when her family fled to the U.S.

Growing up, she saw the look of anxiety on her mother’s face as she waited for the few seconds of news she’d sometimes see about their homeland on Univision newscasts. “That taught me the importance (of being) reflected on that TV, in the newspaper or online.”

After graduating from the University of Southern California, she was accepted into the Times’ entry-level MetPro program, but turned it down to get her start at a smaller paper in Oregon.

MetPro was established in 1984 to integrate journalists of color into the Times’ operation. Instead, it seems to have perpetuated disparities, according to a study published by the Los Angeles Times Guild in 2018: “It became a low wage hiring program. The MetPros are among the lowest paid journalists of the L.A. Times.” Further, these journalists have been denied equal opportunities to grow professionally.

The Guild published disparities it found in both representation and pay, broken down by gender and ethnicity. For example, in 2018, nonwhite women were lowest on the scale.

*Source: LAT Guild Pay Study April 2018*

In 2008, Bermudez became one of the approximately 60 Latino reporters on the Times’ roster.

Despite the number, Latino staffers today represent a 13% of the newsroom in a city where one of every two people is of Mexican, Central or South American heritage.

Bermudez remembers the Guild’s study as very painful. “It affects your confidence and how you feel about your work.” That’s when she decided to speak up.

“This is not only an internal moral obligation, this is a moral conversation for our entire Latino community; for the Latino students who have the hardest time entering the internship roles and all the representation in our environment in L.A.,” she said.

The inequalities were made public with the #SomosLAT Open Letter: 13% of the newsroom is Latino. Of 109 editors and managers, 12 are Latino. There is one Latino on an opinion-editorial team of 14. There are no Latinos on the investigations team. And, after a new owner followed years of staff cuts by adding 168 journalists, 29 were Latinos.

Latino journalists' demands were answered in a letter written by Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. He published a strong statement recognizing mistakes in the paper’s past, and a willingness to redress them:

“The LA Times is not immune to the disease of institutional racism metastasizing in our country. I apologize for not empowering our Latino journalists and staff at the rate and scale required to reverse the legacy of racism and restore the health of our industry. In all avenues of the LAT, our fight to protect and publish stories, images and products that reflect the diversity of Southern California is of tremendous urgency. We are committing to increasing representation of Latinos in our staff and coverage, and to making the LAT more inclusive, secure in the knowledge that LAT and our community will benefit from it. The commitments outlined today cannot erase our failure to prioritize the Latino community. Yet my hope is for this letter to reflect a new page in our story.”

The apology was followed by a special edition of the Times on Sept. 27 that included a note promising an increase in diversity and improved coverage of underrepresented communities. Soon-Shiong wrote: “As the Los Angeles Times’ first nonwhite owners in its nearly 139-year history, my wife, Michele, and I are determined to increase diversity within the organization. We believe that The Times can better represent Los Angeles and California.”

But the letter contained one perfunctory statement about a salary gap that troubled Latino staffers: The paper would “ensure compliance with equal pay law.”

On Nov. 10 the L.A. Times and its former owner, Tribune Publishing, said they would settle a pay-disparity lawsuit for $3 million. After the lawsuit’s final hearing next spring, 240 current and former Black and Latino staffers will get some back pay.

But it won’t end there: Four days after that settlement was announced, Patricia Escárcega, a Times food writer, revealed in a tweet the pay disparity between her and another Times food writer, Bill Addison. She had received a letter from the newspaper explaining why her salary was only two-thirds of Addison’s.

“The L.A. Times said that I am not worth the same as my male or white colleagues,” Escárcega wrote. “The letter says I deserve to make only two-thirds of what my co-critic is paid – even though we have the exact same job responsibilities – because I do not bring prestige to the paper, and because the company says our job classifications aren’t the same.”

The Times responded by arguing that Escárcega’s salary is higher than what the paper’s contract with the Guild calls for, based on her experience. And, she had a chance to challenge the pay schedule before it was ratified, but did not do so. Moreover, the paper said in a published statement, her colleague is paid more because of his experience and the number of prestigious awards he’s won.

*Photo by Betty Chavarria/L.A.Times Guild Latino Caucus*

Pandemic inequality

Over 60% of the journalists we interviewed said they have equal access to information. But digging deeper, we found that even reporters at the largest news organizations, such as Telemundo and Univision, appear to struggle to find materials and answers in Spanish for their audiences. Our interviews found that Spanish-language reporters find it hard to land one-on-one interviews with leading federal or state officials.

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed that the government officials managing the worst health care crisis in a century have no strategy to directly inform millions of people in the United States who rely on Spanish-language media.

While journalists have done outstanding work to document the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Latino communities, Spanish-language reporters continue to face obstacles accessing and disseminating the information needed to inform these communities.

*Karina Neyra and journalist Andrea Forcada pose in front of Qué Pasa in North Carolina for a public education campaign. Photo by Eloy Tupayachi*

Karina Neyra is executive editor of Qué Pasa, a Latino media network in North Carolina. Before COVID-19, the Peruvian-born journalist coordinated the work of approximately 16 reporters and fellows in three local newsrooms.

Because of a drop in advertising during the COVID-19 pandemic, the staff was cut almost to one person in charge of each region even though the pandemic has made Spanish-language news reports more important than ever. Latino essential workers at food processing plants and farms in North Carolina were hit hardest by the coronavirus. Forty-four percent of those infected, to date, are Latino, although they represent only 9% of the state’s population.

Since the pandemic was declared, Gov. Roy Cooper has held daily press briefings and “only once did he answer a question from a Latino journalist,” Neyra said, adding that she has had a hard time obtaining information about the pandemic’s impact on Latinos from county health offices. Last March, she was getting information from only 16 counties that traced cases by ethnicity. By the end of June, after daily insistence, she had received data from 85 counties.

Shunning Spanish-language journalists

Lourdes Torres is the senior vice president for politics at Univision, the largest Hispanic corporation in the U.S. Even at her level, she finds it frustrating that authorities seem to have stopped talking to Latino media outlets. The immigration question has almost become taboo and officials appear afraid of deep questions from Spanish-language journalists.

Immigration is an important concern for Latinos, according to a Univision survey, right up there with health care and jobs and the economy.

Torres believes too many government officials “don’t understand the culture and the diversity among Latinos. They only capture headlines about what matters to (a few) Cubans, to Venezuelans or Mexicans, and don’t address” the need to address diversity and different needs in the community.

Working at Univision for the past 27 years, she has seen how it’s changed for the network’s journalists. Initially, she said, when Univision requested interviews, the answer was simply “Uni what?” It was a reflection of ignorance of Univision’s prominence in U.S. media. Today, people generally know the network, Torres said. Still, authorities and politicians seem reluctant to grant interviews, she said.

“(They are) afraid of entering a world they do not understand. They don’t understand the culture, and the diversity of this non-monolithic group, and prefer to communicate using (public service announcements and) advertising,” Torres said.

Online harassment and threats

*Helen Ubiñas, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s only Latina columnist*

“I have got accustomed that they call me ugly, fat, whore, stupid Puerto Rican, the N word. I’m used to the threats that they will rape me or beat me,” said Helen Ubiñas, a Boricua born in the Bronx who is the only Latina columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she has worked for the last seven years.

She has learned to live with the growing harassment since she started at Connecticut's Hartford Courant, where she worked for 17 years, first as a reporter and later as the only full-time Latina columnist.

In Philadelphia, she has noticed that the language has gotten more inflamed, especially in the last four years. “I wake up in the morning and have almost 75 comments with insults,” on Twitter, Facebook and in text messages, voice mail or emails. It gets rampant when she writes about President Trump or racism. Among all her haters she has identified at least 10 or 12 men who regularly harass her. They even sign with their name and companies.

Seemingly without any hesitation they fill her voice mail with hate messages inviting her to write about baking or considering killing herself. (Heads up: If you choose to listen to one, we warn that there’s inappropriate language.)

“I can stand many insults but the ones that get under my skin are those that question my right to be a columnist. The ones that hurt me the most are the insults that say I don’t belong in my space, that I’m stupid, that I’m not good enough because of my gender and the color of my skin.”

As a woman and a Latina, Ubiñas said, she has felt like she’s on her own. She wants the newspaper to be more aggressive in dealing with online harassment. Blocking comments on the paper’s webpage has not been enough, and haters have found ways to reach journalists, denigrate them, and even expose personal data online, putting families at risk.

Gabriel Escobar, senior vice president and editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, said the newspaper takes these threats seriously and recognizes that unbridled attacks have worsened of late. “The most vile and offensive comments I have ever seen have been directed to Helen,” he said.

The newspaper has turned off comments on some stories, barred offensive commenters, and screened out emails from those who habitually harass. Escobar said that although these measures can help, “all are easily circumvented by people who thrive in hurling daily insults -- and worse.”

The Inquirer is reporting direct threats against Ubiñas and others to police.

Racism remains a problem

Lola has curly black hair and big black eyes that, for a moment as she talked about her experiences, were filled with tears. Tears of fear, she said, because she believed a television news story put one of her subjects at risk. She had presented the story of a young Latino student about to face deportation and lose his right to earn a bachelor’s degree if he could not apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). “I wanted the audience to understand his pain, but instead, I put his life at risk,” Lola said.

Lola is not the reporter’s real name. Lola signed a confidentiality agreement with the corporate owners of her station, and she said she fears reprisals for speaking out about the story and her experiences at the small, rural station in the U.S. South.

A majority of the 288 comments about the story on her station’s Facebook page were laced with racist and xenophobic language aimed at Lola and the DACA student, who is also a member of the local LGBTQ community.

*Screen grabs of comments under Lola’s Facebook feed.*

Lola was born in Massachusetts and raised in the Dominican Republic. She joined the station in 2017 -- her first local TV job. She recalled taking pride in being the first Latina in that newsroom. She was also the only Hispanic in the whole building. Her goal was to increase the visibility of the region’s Latinos. Almost half of the local community is either Black or Latino, but Lola said the station generally avoids spotlighting the diversity.

“Stories taking into account the diversity of the community were wiped out,” she said.

In her first year at the station, Lola worked as a digital reporter. She did publish stories about local Latinos, including one on a church that had become a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants avoiding deportation. But the backlash from the audience dissuaded her editor from pursuing similar stories, she said.

“It wasn’t racism against me, it was against the beat I was working on,” Lola said.

Lola said bias also came out in comments at the station about who could replace a weekend anchor. She was told she was “too short, too dark and too chubby.” Adding layers of makeup, she said, or straightening her hair each day, or standing on a box in the studio did not work. “They didn't want to disappoint the audience by having a Latina anchor,” she said, recalling that station executives told her the commercial audience was made up of white women in their 30’s.

Constant frustration over two years provoked distress and eventually Lola sought psychological care. She sank so low that she was hospitalized to treat extreme depression and anxiety. She realized her audience, and her ratings-driven workplace, would not accept her identity. So she quit. The move proved fruitful: She’s thriving in a new reporting position covering immigration and a local Latino population. She said she now feels empowered to question governmental policies and practices on behalf of her readers.

Nonstop workplace microaggressions

“Always keeping a defensive attitude at work is exhausting,” said Anne Carol Bono, who earned a master’s degree in Raleigh, N.C., and now works as a commercial producer at WLFL, a Sinclair Group television station. Bono is from Guatemala and she remembers there was only one other Latino on staff, as well as two Asian Americans and seven African-Americans, on a team of about 50 people.

Bono, who had proudly revealed her national origin to her employers, regretted it almost immediately: She began fielding microaggressions due to her identity. Several colleagues, including her boss, said, “I can’t understand you because of your accent,” even though her English is clear.

She recalled an incident she said she found particularly disgusting. The station’s chief engineer told her “talk to me in Spanish as I don´t understand you anyway,” she said. More offensive was him tossing a dish as she washed her own coffee cup in the station’s kitchen.

Later, while filming a commercial in which one of the subjects did not speak English, she was told to “do your thing,” as if speaking in another language was some kind of circus performance.

“All these actions drain your self-esteem and undermine your confidence,” Bono said.

She left the station, she said, once she became convinced that diversity, and inclusion of a Latino voice, was not a priority for the company.

The Sinclair Broadcast Group is widely seen as an ally of Trump and conservative politicians. It’s one of the nation’s largest broadcasters, yet its “Why Work Here” page on its website says little about diversity and doesn’t reference any plans for forming diverse workplaces. The company has not replied to an invitation to talk about its diversity plan or the experiences of some employees. In December, Sinclair advertised that it would hire a “Diversity and Talent Management Specialist.”

Recognizing Spanish as a special skill

“If I need to get 100 emails harassing me, I’ll take them to be able to bring at least one story to my Latino community.” -- Sonia Gutierrez

Sonia Gutierrez’s determination was on full display when the Tegna Network sent her from her home station, WLTX in South Carolina, to cover the flooding caused by Hurricane Joaquin in late September 2015. She started her live coverage in English, and then switched briefly to Spanish to repeat the most important emergency safety measures. Viewers later said they appreciated the extra step. So did her station, which then sent her to Houston to cover Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Gutierrez has been nominated for Emmy awards for that reporting. She describes it as a new way to “contar historias,” or tell stories in multiple languages in the same report. It would not come as a shock to multi-lingual viewers, as this is how they communicate in their daily lives.

The positive outcome of Gutierrez’s example was countered by the pessimistic view of several Latino journalists in the survey, who said employers don’t often show an appreciation of bilingual skills.

*Julieta Martinelli with Matthew Charles attending an investigative journalism conference in Florida. Photo by Julieta Martinelli*

For the monolingual mainstream media, “your experience as a tough reporter in Spanish language newsrooms doesn't count.”

That was the frustrating experience of Julieta Martinelli, an Argentine-born investigative journalist. “They don’t bother reading your portfolio, nor (do they) consider it valid if it’s not in English.”

After immigrating to the United States, Martinelli entered college at age 25, a little older than most of her classmates. She said college provided a theoretical knowledge of journalism, but that her principal experience had come from years of “pateando la calle” -- reporting on the streets -- in Atlanta, where she grew up. She learned the craft of investigative reporting starting in high school and then as a newsroom intern. She won valuable experience and developed sources among local police and immigration authorities, and in courthouses.

All that helped Martinelli write a landmark story about Matthew Charles, the first inmate to benefit from the First Step Act, a change in the way prison officials help prepare prisoners for life in general society. She later accompanied him as a special guest to the 2018 State of tThe Union 2018 address. The Washington Examiner called her story a “moving report.”

Yet none of that seemed to matter when it came to her bid to remain as a full-time reporter at a TV station in Atlanta, where she had been an intern after graduation from college. She said her boss told her, “Come back when you have 10 additional years of experience,” just before he promoted a younger white male intern.

Today Martinelli works as a multimedia journalist for Latino USA in New York.

So many “isms” to deal with

“Women have an expiration date” said Marisol Seda, a 53-year-old journalist who in 2018 became the first woman to sue cable station NY1 for sexism and ageism. Her lawsuit fueled a movement against gender and age discrimination.

Seda’s legal challenge was born of frustration: She had won praise for covering important stories and beats, but she said she was not allowed to grow in the newsroom and was never considered for an anchor position. She attributes the professional cold shoulder to her gender and her age.

Another eight women -- most of them Latinas -- filed lawsuits similar to Seda’s, further adding complaints of retaliation. Some of those suits were recently settled.

Seda said they’re challenging the accepted formula of a television news anchor desk consisting of a man with distinctive gray temples, next to a young woman who meets a stereotype of beauty.

Celimar Adames Casalduc knows all about that.

She has worked at WAPA TV in Puerto Rico for more than 18 years. She was the fifth co-anchor to her male counterpart, José Guillermo Torres, who retired at the age of 68 and, in a story about his tenure, is said to have broken “the Guinness record with the longest career in the same station after 43 years.”

*Celimar Adames Casalduc on the WAPA anchor desk in Puerto Rico.*

Adames is no longer an anchor, and her standing with the station has become tense after she sued the channel for paying her 45% less than the station’s male journalists, even some with 10 fewer years in the business.

“We spend careers denouncing injustices against people and the disparities suffered by the disadvantaged. We condemn everything that is wrong in society. But when it's our turn, we have to keep quiet. It seems like complaints fall on deaf ears and in total invisibility,” Adames said. “I spoke out about the inequality for many years until it was my turn to go to the courts.”

The Fundamedios study

Findings in this report are part of Fundamedios´ ongoing research into the current state of Latino journalists in U.S. media. The organization maintains a hotline where Latino and other journalists can document incidents of discrimination, acts of violence or retaliation, or restrictions of press freedoms. In October, Fundamedios joined other press freedom groups this year in denouncing aggressions against journalists before the Inter American Commission of Human Rights. The organization also promotes #JournalistsConversando, weekly discussions on newsroom issues with local and national journalists from around the United States.

Dissed