If you consume media, there’s no escaping ICE and other major news stories – but the scope and contour of the coverage may depend on the language you speak.
By Susan Barnett | Original Photography by Michael Dunn
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided several Mexican restaurants in Tucson last December, local journalists were the first on the scene. Cameras captured ICE agents carrying boxes out of Taco Giro, a Mexican restaurant on Tucson’s west side, followed by another group pouring from an unmarked van, firing pepper spray and rubber pellets into a crowd of protesters.
Reporters scrambled to get accurate information to the state’s two major audiences: consumers who take their media in English, and those who do so in Spanish.
By and large, the scenes captured by news cameras and described by reporters that day were the same regardless of language, but the coverage that emerged in the hours and days that followed was not – different interviews, different follow-up stories, a profoundly different sense of scope and advocacy.
As much as any recent news story, the ICE raids confirmed a truism about modern American life – we tend to observe the world from inside an ever-fracturing menagerie of media bubbles. We see news events as our bubbles allow us, through surfaces lensed by language, access and identity.
But what do we miss? And how can English- and Spanish-speakers alike manipulate their viewpoints to make their understanding of news events be more complete?
Depending on the source one might cite, between 19 and 21 percent of Arizonans report Spanish as their primary language at home – a population of roughly 1,300,000 people. Catering to them: nine TV stations (including affiliates of broadcast giants Telemundo and Univision in both Phoenix and Tucson); approximately 33 radio stations; a growing cohort of digital news services like La Voz (owned by The Arizona Republic); and a dwindling survivor pool of print publications, including Prensa Arizona.
Often, these organizations approach news in the classic tradition of a community newspaper – more granular and narrowly focused than “mainstream” outlets, covering overlooked stories and sometimes performing a watchdog function.
“Our way of covering it is from a perspective where we are part of the [Hispanic] community, versus an English-language media outlet that is also part of the community but perhaps doesn’t understand the background and the cultural context,” says Noe González, vice president of news at Telemundo Arizona. “We represent the community in this newsroom, just as we represent the community on the streets when we are working.”
Telemundo’s first Arizona broadcast in 1989 didn’t just tap a lucrative market – it also opened a door for novel newsgathering. Having a shared language, culture and lived experience can give Spanish-speaking journalists deeper trust and access to immigrant communities, and a leg up in reporting critical news stories involving Spanish-speakers, like the ICE raids.
“I believe that this is a superpower, because it strengthens our journalism, allowing us to practice it in a more humane way,” says Maritza L. Félix, founder of Conecta Arizona, a local nonprofit news site that covers the Hispanic community in Arizona and Sonora, Félix’s home state. “What we do is listen with much more empathy, because we can understand what they are going through, because we are also experiencing it ourselves, both professionally and personally.”
What unfolded outside that restaurant in December was not just an ICE operation, but a case study on how English- and Spanish-language media outlets serve their respective communities.
Telemundo’s coverage of the Tucson raids focused on community voices and guidance from the Consulate General of Mexico in Tucson, which offered legal counseling and help locating detained family members. The story centered immigrants as key actors and provided practical resources for those directly affected. Critically, it also included an exclusive interview with the Hispanic restaurant owner.
Meanwhile, KGUN 9’s English-language broadcast offered a broader, more traditional report: interviews with an ICE protester and a counter-protester, a statement from ICE and multiple official statements from Tucson Police Department and Mayor Regina Romero. The station noted unsuccessful attempts to reach the restaurant owner.
Both stories endeavored to meet basic journalistic standards – verifying accurate information, unbiased reporting, etc. – but reflected different priorities and different access.
“Our way of serving the audience is being there for the community when they need it most, from providing information to being the bridge so that the audience can receive those available services,” González says. “It’s community journalism, something that empowers you, that provides you with information that’s valuable to our community, that allows them to be well-informed and make better decisions on a daily basis.”
The appeal of local Spanish-language media is enhanced by the relative paucity of Latino voices and faces on the national level. Despite comprising 20 percent of the U.S. population, Latinos generally hold between 10 and 15 percent of network anchor desks, according to a report by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) – with even fewer producing and editing positions. This lack of representation shapes not only which stories get covered, but how they’re covered.
“Many Latinos, immigrants whom we serve, who are bilingual and still read the most widely circulated newspaper, don’t feel seen or reflected in the coverage provided by that traditional newspaper or an English-language television station,” Félix says. “They still feel like they’re just a quota, a ‘nice to have,’ but they don’t feel heard or represented.”
Though Spanish-language media outlets tend to center Hispanic voices, few if any limit themselves to exclusively covering the Hispanic community. Rather, they cover any news that impacts the Hispanic community – and often it’s the same news that impacts Arizona at large.
For example, when political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September at a college campus in Utah, the story was top-of-the-broadcast news on every Spanish-language broadcast in Arizona. Like many mainstream stations, Telemundo Arizona homed in on his local impact as an Arizona resident.
“We covered it extensively,” González says. “It happened in Utah, but Charlie lived here, and his business was here in Phoenix, so we gave it that coverage because of the relevance of a local individual, a prominent figure. And it had a national impact.”
Telemundo covered the breaking news, community reactions and the funeral services, and spoke with analysts about political violence, much like its English-language counterparts.
Finer nuances in reporting can be found in stories with universal import. When Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were disrupted during the recent government shutdown, Telemundo Arizona and Conecta Arizona covered it in a way that invariably centered Hispanic and immigrant voices. English-language news stations, on the other hand, tended to focus on different vulnerable communities. At ABC15, reporter Nick Ciletti filed a report called “Demand surges, especially for seniors, as issues with SNAP continue,” which poignantly detailed the shutdown’s impact on the elderly.
Are there collective blind spots in Latino-centered media? Arguably. Limited to Spanish-language news, audiences may miss the deeper political minutiae and national framing that English-language outlets often prioritize.
With fewer resources at hand, Spanish-language newsrooms can’t cover it all.
For example, the proliferation of data centers in the Valley has become a point of contention locally, given their resource demands and noise pollution. But coverage of the story at an in-depth level has mostly been left to the English-speaking media.
Ultimately, this example speaks less about the limitations of Spanish-language news than it does about the limitations of a media monoculture. After all, conservative viewers can’t find all the answers on Fox News, either. Félix recommends auditing news sources outside one’s own linguistic comfort zone to achieve good media citizenship.
“People who are only consuming information in English could perhaps use artificial intelligence and visit other news sites in Spanish so they can see and compare some other stories that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise,” Félix says. “Including, for example, the access we have to many communities whose stories [English-language] media outlets can’t cover because they don’t speak the language.”
English-language newsrooms are acutely aware that language can be the decisive factor in whether a journalist gets an interview that offers a unique insight on a story.
“When it comes to the Hispanic community, we certainly, like everybody else, can do a better job,” says Morgan Loew, managing editor and chief investigative reporter at Arizona’s Family, home of 3TV and CBS 5. “It’s really easy to pitch stories that affect your neighborhood and where you grew up. It’s a little harder to get stories that affect people and maybe an area in a neighborhood that you don’t live in.”
General-audience news organizations attempt to mitigate overlooking certain communities by hiring diverse and bilingual reporters that come from the communities they aim to serve. In every major Valley TV newsroom, you’ll find reporters, producers, photographers and others that are bilingual and can be the bridge between the newsroom and the Spanish-speaking community.
“Pairing the right reporter with the right story [is the main solution], because when you can actually speak to somebody, you’re going to get confidence from them and they’re going to feel more comfortable telling you their story,” Loew says. “If I start speaking Spanish when I’m trying to get somebody to talk, the guard goes down a little bit and you get the real story, and that benefits our viewers and it benefits them.”
Some newsrooms produce both English and Spanish content. At NBC affiliate 12 News/KPNX in Phoenix, the newsroom simultaneously manages 12 News en Español alongside its mainline website. Spanish-language reporters produce original content, but more often than not translate stories written in English to provide their Spanish-speaking audience with the same news and information as their general audience.
“There are times when I want to translate many articles because we think it could be relevant to the community,” says Yolanda García-Espinoza, senior digital producer for 12 News en Español. “But then we have to consider whether people actually need to be informed about this, or if they need to be aware of something else, because with practically only one person in the department, it’s difficult to get much done.”
Her approach involves analyzing her own scrolling and news-gathering habits as someone who is a part of the Hispanic community. She looks not only for things that will keep her community informed, but also stories that are funny, catch people’s attention or bring a message of hope, she says.
If Spanish-language fluency and cultural solidarity provide advantages for Latino reporters reporting on certain stories, their ethnicity can also heighten risk, especially as the government-media relationship becomes more fraught. Last year, Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist with an active asylum case, was deported, sparking concern among many Hispanic journalists and an official statement of protest by the NAHJ.
More recently, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort – two journalists covering immigration activity in Minneapolis – were arrested by federal authorities.
“I know that identity for us, at least in our newsroom, we see it as a superpower,” Félix says. “But we know that on the street, it makes us a target. Identity can be a factor that makes us much more vulnerable when we’re doing our job. Besides, we work in Spanish, we all have very strong accents, we look very Latino and we have this vulnerability related to our immigration status.”
She says that her newsroom has gotten messages on social media harassing them for their identity and the work they do.
“‘You’re all wetbacks, we’re going to send people after you.’ Then they sent us another one telling us to learn to speak English, then they sent us another one saying we were a bunch of [expletive] Mexicans and that we should return people’s emails and belongings,” Félix recalls. “And these are from people who don’t even know us or speak the language, but who follow us everywhere.”
Félix, a naturalized citizen, says that while she feels protected by her legal status, she is still at risk because of how she looks and sounds – and she knows other journalists who feel the same.
Threats toward immigrant journalists don’t only happen at protests or when they cover immigration-related topics.
“On one occasion, a person at a community health fair got upset because I was speaking Spanish and representing the television station I was working for, and they verbally attacked me,” García-Espinoza says. “We encounter these things, from small things to potentially big things, and it’s a constant reminder that we always have to be careful and we always have to look out for our safety… in both media and perhaps non-media contexts.”
As the political and social climate becomes increasingly convoluted, both English- and Spanish-language media are working to continue covering important issues and delivering them to their respective audiences.
“We have a daily responsibility, with Spanish-language media, to lead the way on the most relevant issues. And to do so carefully, so that this audience receives this information and it can empower their lives, or bring a positive impact to their lives,” González says.
While stories told in English and Spanish may differ in emphasis, depth and cultural understanding, together they reveal a broader truth: Arizona’s communities are experiencing the same events in profoundly different ways.
And neither audience can see the full picture alone.
“Yes, we are Spanish-language media, yes, we are English-language media, but ultimately, the line is very thin,” García-Espinoza says. “In the end, we’re all in this together, not just as media outlets, but as a community.”
