What I've learned so far...

Last week, it was my group's turn to present for the Global News Media course I am enrolled in (and for which I have to keep up this blog), Journalism 312i. While the whole experience was very much overwhelming and stressful to say the least, in all honesty I admit that I had fun, and that I learned so much from my classmates alone...and for that I am very grateful.

Anyway, not to sound like a scratched disk or anything, but I really want to explain what the assignment entailed. Our focus was Latin American media, both in their respective countries and here in the United States.

Basically, as a group we decided to go about by first explaining and giving a brief overview of the media structure in each of our countries. (Coincidentally, we just so happened to be doing our blogs on Latin American countries: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Guatemala), in addition to mentioning characteristics of Latin American media as a whole.

Afterward, we were going to explain the latter half: interesting characteristics of Spanish-speaking media in the United States.

However, given the whole experience/research, there was so much information we felt was needed to cover, just to provide context and to fulfill the important individual characteristics of each country, that needless to say we took up the whole class period going over what we were just going to brush over "quickly"!

And ultimately, in my mind, it reinforced a very common theme I've found, and that I wanted to mention in class but don't think I really did...that it's very  hard to generalize and wrap everything nice and pretty under one label. And that this is perhaps a metaphoric example of a larger issue.

What do I mean by this?

It seems to me, in my observation, that there exists the tendency to group Latinos under the same category, almost to assume that there really is no difference between people from Mexico and people from El Salvador. That you won't find cultural, political, and MEDIA-BASED structural differences, or at least enough to warrant an exclusive, independent outlook for each.

I'm not sure if I'm making any sense, but I truly did grow frustrated with this, because it led me to the conclusion that if that is that case, then for sure it is something that should be addressed.

 In this business where we hopefully aim to be responsible handlers and distributors of information, it's a real eye-opener to notice the stark diversity within each country, respectively, and in turn see an almost generic approach here in the United States. Like, there is so much more than what Univision has to offer, so much more to the stereotypes garnering headlines about Latinos in general but that media monopolies simply don't allow that extra room, that extra diverse coverage to clarify.

I mean, I understand that it is almost idealistic, to expect and demand full coverage of every little corner, but I don't know...it was just very unsettling to realize that this is, maybe, an example of how media conglomerates and large ownership of media outlets by few individuals tend to exclude the individualities of the "lesser" players.

This experience opened my eyes just a little more...and I know that besides Latin American countries, this tendency of generalizing what we aren't too familiar with (like i don't know, perhaps grouping most Middle Eastern countries together, for example?)

Anyway, I just felt like rambling about this a bit... :D