The New York Times Goes On Safari, Tracking Latinos For Trump In My Hometown

Navarrette Nation Substack — A Journo’s Journal 11/27/24

Critical Thinking At A Critical Time

Every Wednesday

724 words; 8 min

The profession of opinion journalism has a mile-wide streak of hypocrisy running right through the middle of it.

Opinion writers make their living telling people what to do — mostly public figures, elected officials, government employees, city leaders, state and federal lawmakers and the like. Fix that pothole, Mr. Mayor. Pass that bill, Congressman. Root out corruption, Chief of Police.

Yet the folks who make up the Yakkity Yak Industrial Complex hate it when someone swoops in and tries to tell them what to do.

“What” might include the news media hiring more Latino journalists. Currently, the numbers are atrocious. In fact, they’re probably worse than they were 20 years ago. Back then, Latinos accounted for just 4% of newspaper reporters. For columnists, editorial writers and editors, the diversity figures were even bleaker. They never improved.

Today, in the Fourth Estate, we’re going backwards. Just as the United States is becoming less white, newspapers are becoming more white.

I didn’t read this part in a book. I’ve been in the belly of the beast. In a career spanning 34 years, I’ve worked for three newspapers, written more than 4,000 opinion columns and penned about 1,200 editorials.

I say all this to explain why I wince whenever I read a headline like the one I read this week in The New York Times. Dateline Fresno, it went like this:

“In California’s Heartland, Some Latino Immigrants Back Trump’s Border Stance.”