The screen grab above is evidence of a major issues gap between Spanish-language and English-language media.
This evening, I got these alerts about Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor, setting out to block the extension of driver’s licenses and public benefits to young illegal immigrants who received work authorizations through an order issued by President Obama. Here’s the Univision web version of the story, and here’s the Arizona Republic’s version in English. If you care about America’s fractured immigration policy, Mrs. Brewer’s order is a really big deal.
I don’t get a lot of push alerts from Univision’s Noticias app. When I do, they’re usually pretty conventional - announcements that Mitt Romney es el ganador in the primary in Michigan, for instance. Other major news events mostly translated into Spanish. And they don’t come in all that frequently.
But apparently it’s not that big of a deal for most national English-language media. I didn’t receive a single news alert from any English-language news organization.
At The New York Times, our policy for sending out mobile push alerts is to ask if a story would merit interrupting someone’s dinner. Univision shows similar restraint in alerts, too. Our coverage of today’s line-ups by young illegal immigrants to apply for work authorizations doesn’t mention Mrs. Brewer’s ruling right now. I couldn’t find any reference to it in my Twitter feed immediately after the announcement, either, and it’s not on Fox News’s home page. The top Spanish-language news outlet in America thinks this story merits national attention, but among us Gringoes, it hardly merits a blink.
Today, Univision also called on the Commission on Presidential Debates to host a debate that focused on issues important to Latino viewers. I don’t know whether that’s really the best thing given the variety of interest groups that are concerned with the presidential election - all of them. But seeing the relative weighting of Mrs. Brewer’s order in Spanish- and English-language national media really does drive home that there is a variance in the issues that concern English-only and Spanish-speaking Americans.