Contemporary Network Television News Reporting About Latinos: Successes, Failures, and a Range of Proposals to Correct Its Limitations

Otto Santa Anna presents findings from his forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Network News (Texas). In it he elaborates standard cognitive metaphor analysis (as is used for printed texts), blending cognitive science with humanist scholarship, to attempt to capture the full semiotic range of televised reporting. His review of a full year of contemporary network news stories about Latinos reveals both the high production values and journalistic limitations of network reporting. This critical semiotic analysis offers an explanation about how news viewers construct partial understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. At the end of this talk he offers a range of recommendations, from modest to radical, to address these limitations.

Otto Santa Ana, UCLA Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana